ABUSE TRACKER

NEW JERSEY
JTA

(JTA) — Three rabbis were convicted in federal court of planning to kidnap Jewish men in order to force them to grant their wives a religious writ of divorce.

The three Orthodox rabbis were convicted late Tuesday in federal court in Trenton, N.J. of conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Two of the rabbis also were convicted of attempted kidnapping.

The jury debated for three days after a two-month trial on the case of Rabbi Mendel Epstein, 69, of Lakewood, N.J.; Rabbi Jay Goldstein, 60, of Brooklyn; and Rabbi Binyamin Stimler, 39, of Brooklyn, CBS New York reported.

They are part of a group of men, including at least one other rabbi, who operated a ring that kidnapped men and used violence, including beatings and stun guns, until they agreed to the religious divorce.

Under Orthodox Jewish law, a wife cannot divorce without obtaining the writ, known as a get, from her husband. She also can not remarry in a Jewish ceremony without the get.

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NEW JERSEY
The JC

By Rosa Doherty, April 22, 2015

Three Orthodox rabbis have been convicted for a Sopranos-style plot in which they planned the torture of Jewish men who refused to divorce their wives.

Rabbis Mendel Epstein, Jay Goldstein and Binyamin Stimler were found guilty on one count of conspiracy to commit kidnapping in a New Jersey federal court on Tuesday.

Rabbi Goldstein, 60, and Rabbi Stimler, 39, were also convicted on an additional charge of attempted kidnapping.

The rabbis were part of a gang accused of taking tens of thousands of dollars to torture men with electric cattle prods and screwdrivers for refusing to grant gets to their wives.

They were arrested in October 2013 after an undercover FBI operation in which an agent posed as an Orthodox woman.

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USA
NOS

De paus heeft het ontslag geaccepteerd van een Amerikaanse bisschop die een pedofiele priester beschermde. Het is voor zover bekend de eerste keer dat een paus in zo’n geval maatregelen neemt.

De 62-jarige bisschop Robert Finn uit Kansas City hield priester Shawn Ratigan maandenlang de hand boven het hoofd nadat op de computer van de laatste kinderporno was gevonden. Finn stuurde Ratigan naar een therapeut, gaf hem een nieuwe baan en beval hem uit de buurt van kinderen te blijven – wat de priester niet deed.

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USA
kath.net

Wegen Missbrauchs-Vertuschung verurteilter Bischof tritt zurück – Robert Finn wurde zu einem Symbol für das Versagen der US-Kirche im Umgang mit dem Missbrauch von Minderjährigen. Von Thomas Spang (KNA)

Kansas City (kath.net/KNA) Die Opfer sexueller Übergriffe von Priestern im Mittleren Westen der USA haben schon lange auf das Abdanken des umstrittenen Bischofs gewartet. Genauer gesagt vier Jahre, seit sie zusammen mit Katholiken des Bistums Kansas City-Saint Joseph in einer Petition öffentlich den Rücktritt von Robert Finn (Archivfoto) verlangten. Im Mai 2011 hatten die Behörden den Priester Shawn Ratigan festgenommen, auf dessen Computer sich Kinderpornografie fand, die dieser zum Teil selber produziert hatte.

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NEW YORK
TWC News

By Meg Rossman

AMHERST, N.Y. — Vanessa DeRosa and Tino Flores want change, and it’s something the two alleged victims of child sexual abuse believe will only come with a new state law.

“It’s very frustrating, and I’m sure not just for myself. I’m sure it’s frustrating for a lot of people,” said DeRosa. “There’s countless reasons why people don’t come forward in the time frame allowed by the law.”

“People are afraid, they don’t want to say anything,” explained Flores. “Especially kids, they think ‘who’s going to believe me?'”

Earlier this year, DeRosa and Flores shared their stories in the hopes of helping other victims. DeRosa said she was abused by a Catholic School teacher when she was 13. Flores said a priest started abusing him at age 10.

Under current laws, the statute of limitations ran out when they turned 23. On Wednesday, Flores will head to Albany in hopes of convincing state lawmakers to pass the Child Victims Act which would extend that window.

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AUSTRALIA
Radio Australia

Child sex abuse inquiry: Senior Catholic nun apologises to victims from Neerkol orphanage in Queensland

By William Rollo

A senior Catholic nun has apologised to victims of sexual abuse at St Joseph’s Orphanage at Neerkol, near Rockhampton, during her testimony at a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse hearing.

Hundreds of children were beaten, molested and raped at St Joseph’s over three decades up until the late 1970s.

Sisters of Mercy Australia leader Berneice Loch finished her testimony this morning at the inquiry, which is investigating systemic abuse at the orphanage.

Sister Loch was a senior member of the Sisters of Mercy when allegations of abuse at the orphanage first came to light in the 1990s.

She now leads the order’s Australian branch.

Under cross-examination this morning, Sister Loch apologised to the victims of abuse.

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AUSTRALIA
Herald Sun

MICHAEL MADIGAN AND AAP THE COURIER-MAIL APRIL 22, 2015

NUNS accused of abusing children at a notorious Queensland orphanage refused to meet the victims as adults because they feared not remembering what happened, a national inquiry has heard.

Up to five of the Sister of Mercy nuns alleged to have abused children at Neerkol Orphanage were still alive in the 1990s, but many were “anxious and nervous” about meeting victims.

As the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Rockhampton nears the end of a two-week hearing, a former nun has recalled the reactions of the Sisters of Mercy alleged to have abused and humiliated children at St Joseph’s Orphanage at Neerkol, west of the city.

Di-Anne Rowan, a former teacher and religious education co-ordinator who left the order in 2003, told the hearing she believed between three and five of the nuns facing allegations of abuse were still alive when the accusations came into the public arena in the early 90s.

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AUSTRALIA
The Morning Bulletin

CATHOLIC Bishop of Rockhampton Michael McCarthy and Institute of Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea leader Sister Berneice Loch have renewed their apology to child abuse victims at Neerkol.

The pair has issued a joint statement this afternoon following the completion of the Royal Commission into child abuse hearing in Rockhampton.

The hearing heard confronting evidence from former residents at the Neerkol orphanage who were victims of sexual and physical abuse.

Bishop McCarthy and Sister Loch’s statement said:

“Over the past two weeks we have listened to the women and men who were physically, emotionally and sexually abused by priests of the Diocese of Rockhampton and sisters and staff at St Joseph’s Orphanage, Neerkol.

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UNITED KINGDOM
Western Daily Press

A Saltford church worker and child abuser has walked from court a free man – despite having just been jailed for two and a half years for sexual offences.

A judge condemned Philip Barlow as a “hypocrite, liar and a paedophile” as he imposed the jail term.

But because the married 33-year-old has already served the equivalent time in prison, he is a free man today.

In December 2011, Barlow was jailed for four years after being found guilty of 14 offences of sexual abuse of two young girls. The convictions were later quashed on appeal and a retrial ordered.

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OREGON
The Oregonian

By Rick Bella | The Oregonian/OregonLive
on April 21, 2015

The defense in the child sex abuse case against Happy Valley Pastor Mike Sperou opened Tuesday by calling on a former prosecutor who rejected the allegations in 1997.

Multnomah County Circuit Judge Cheryl A. Albrecht limited what the jury could hear, ruling that former Deputy District Attorney Rodney Hopkinson’s testimony could be prejudicial if he went into detail about why he declined to prosecute Sperou back then.

Sperou, who leads the North Clackamas Bible Community, has been charged with three counts of first-degree sexual penetration. If convicted on all counts, he would face a mandatory minimum sentence of eight years, four months in prison.

Seven women allege that Sperou sexually abused them when they were young girls growing up in the church during the 1980s and 1990s. The Oregonian/OregonLive generally does not disclose the names of possible sexual abuse victims, but all seven women connected with the case have come forward, asking that their stories be told.

Prosecutor Chris Mascal called on all seven women to testify over five days before resting Monday. The women — including Shannon Clark, the alleged victim in this case – all told the jury that Sperou took advantage of his position as church leader and abused them.

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UNITED STATES
Renew America

By Matt C. Abbott

First, please pray for the repose of the soul of Cardinal Francis George. I always appreciated his politeness – he would address me by name at various Catholic events over the years – and he obviously was a prayerful and intelligent man. Requiescat in pace.
————————————–

Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-Saint Joseph, Missouri, is the latest casualty of the clergy sex abuse scandal, which has cost U.S. dioceses and religious orders close to $3 billion since 2004.

Esteemed Catholic journalist/commentator Phil Lawler once again hits the nail on the head. The following are excerpts from his latest commentary at Catholic World News (click here to read it in its entirety).

Bishop Finn had to go. When he was convicted on criminal charges, he became the poster boy for the American bishops’ mishandling of the sex abuse crisis. He was an irresistible target for critics of Catholicism: a walking, talking symbol of episcopal negligence….

For the many Catholics who admire Bishop Finn’s strong defense of Catholic teaching, including myself, his case is tragic. For others who opposed his pastoral initiatives – such as the National Catholic Reporter, which, Bishop Finn had confirmed, had lost the right to describe itself as a ‘Catholic’ publication – his departure has provided an occasion for unseemly delight. But the bishop’s staunch orthodoxy is not the issue here.

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CHILE
Catholic Culture

Father Pedro Kliegel, a parish priest in Osorno, Chile, is offering a “Mass of hope” on April 22 to express opposition to the recent appointment of Bishop Juan Barros, who has been accused of covering up sexual abuse.

According to Chilean media reports, a retired bishop, Bishop Juan Luis Ysern of San Carlos de Ancud, has suggested that the Vatican appoint an apostolic visitor to examine the situation.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

Dennis Coday | Apr. 21, 2015 NCR Today

Why did Bishop Finn reason? is a question I have been numerous times in the last 12 hours fielding questions from other media outlets and a few local Catholics. I can’t answer that question definitively, because of the secrecy that cloaks these proceedings. But I can say why NCR called for his resignation in 2012 immediately after his conviction for failing to report suspected child abuse.

The answer is two-fold: Finn violated civil law, as the Jackson County judge ruled, but also he violated the the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children, the protocols the bishops wrote themselves to govern their actions in case of clergy sex abuse. Here’s what NCR said in September 2104:

If Bishop Robert W. Finn wanted today to volunteer at a parish in the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese to teach a religious education class or chaperone a parish youth group to World Youth Day, he couldn’t do it. Convicted of a misdemeanor charge of failure to report suspected child abuse, Finn wouldn’t pass the background check necessary to work with young people in the Catholic church.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Pope Francis accepting the resignation of a bishop who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph in Missouri for nearly 10 years. Bishop Robert Finn was convicted by a judge of failing to report suspected child abuse, but did not plead guilty as the story stated. A corrected version of the story will be sent.

The AP

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter

Brian Roewe Soli Salgado | Apr. 21, 2015

KANSAS CITY, MO. Emotions ran high among Catholics in the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese as word spread that Bishop Robert Finn had resigned Tuesday morning. The reactions ranged from sadness and disappointment among Finn’s supporters to relief among his critics.

Nearly all who spoke to NCR talked of the pain of the last few years, and all expressed a need for the diocese to enter a time of healing.

Fr. Pat Rush, pastor at Visitation Parish, echoed the message of Kansas City, Kan., Archbishop Joseph Naumann, named administrator of the neighboring diocese, in hoping the new phase “will be a time of grace and healing for the diocese.”

“We all know the Vatican can work slowly, and I hope it does not work slowly because I think we have been adrift. And I think we’ll continue to be adrift until such a time as we have a bishop that we can kind of all feel that he has a goal of supporting and strengthening the communion of the church,” Rush told NCR.

Rush was one of about a dozen priests and parishioners — supporters, critics and neutral people — interviewed in September 2014 during an apostolic visitation into Finn’s leadership of the diocese. Those interviews led to a report to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.

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UNITED STATES
CNN

By Greg Botelho, CNN

(CNN)Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn, who remained on the job for years after becoming the highest-ranking U.S. Catholic official convicted in connection with the church’s long-running sex abuse scandal, the Vatican announced Tuesday.

Finn, who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, was found guilty in 2012 of failure to report suspected child abuse.

The case was tried by a judge instead of by jury because prosecutors wanted to protect the young victims’ anonymity.

Finn was convicted of one count but not a misdemeanor charge he’d also faced. He was put on two years’ probation but was not forced to spend time in jail or pay a fine, according to the Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Two charges against his diocese were dropped. …

Candida Moss — a professor at Notre Dame, a Catholic university in Indiana — said it “doesn’t look very urgent” that a decision came down only now, nearly three years after the conviction and five months after O’Malley’s comments. Several factors may have played a role in the delay, including views from lawyers or power players at the Vatican, who may be reluctant to cast blame at high-level officials who don’t report allegations quickly enough to government authorities.

But the timing of the announcement may make sense given that it comes weeks after Francis came under fire for the installation of a new bishop in Chile, Juan Barros, despite protesters’ claims he was complicit in sexual abuse cases there.

“It kind of shook Francis’ reputation,” said Moss. “Having this resignation and putting right one of the more visible injustices on this, especially in the U.S., I think this is a typical Francis way to reinstall confidence.” …

To that point, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org asked for more elaboration than the Vatican’s one-line announcement that Francis accepted the resignation “in accordance with … Canon Law.”

Anne Doyle, from the watchdog group that documents the Catholic church’s abuse crisis, called Finn’s removal “a good step but just the beginning.”

“The pope must show that this decision represents a meaningful shift in papal practice — that it signals a new era in bishop accountability,” Doyle said. “… What no pope has done to date is publicly confirm that he removed a culpable bishop because of his failure to make children’s safety his first priority. We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately.”

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NEW YORK
WIVB

[with video]

By George Richert, News 4 Reporter

AMHERST, N.Y. (WIVB) — A local victim of child abuse is on a lobby mission to Albany this week.

Tino Flores will accompany his attorney William Lorenz to the State Capitol Wednesday to lobby for passage of the Child Abuse Act which would end the statute of limitations for adult victims of child abuse who want to press charges against their abusers.

Under current State law people have five years after they turn eighteen to press charges against someone who sexually abused them. Flores says that’s not enough. He says he was molested by a priest and it took him thirty years to come to terms with it.

“We need change. we need people to listen. We need the adults and the children that are abused to open up and spill their guts,” said Flores.

The Child Abuse Act would also create a one year window in which child abuse victims could press charges against someone who abused them decades ago.

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NEW JERSAY
Failed Messiah

Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Defense attorneys for the alleged “Prodfather,” Rabbi Mendel Epstein, and three of his associates asked a federal judge to grant a mistrial today.

The judge, US District Court Judge Freda L. Wolfson, denied the motion.

Instead, she told the jury to disregard an incorrect sentence in the indictment the jury was given last week when it began its deliberations in Epstein’s get (Jewish divorce) extortion and kidnapping trial. The jury was given a corrected indictment, as well.

According to the Asbury Park Press, the mistaken sentence reads as follows. “Defendant Mendel Epstein further stated…that Mendel Epstein’s son is one of the ‘tough guys’ who uses his karate skills on the husbands to facilitate the coerced divorces.”

But the government previously admitted Mendel Epstein did not make that comment about his son at the meeting from which the quote was taken.

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NEW JERSEY
NJ.com

By MaryAnn Spoto | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
on April 21, 2015

TRENTON — A jury on Tuesday convicted Lakewood Rabbi Mendel Epstein and two of his three defendants of kidnapping conspiracy and attempted kidnapping charges for the beating of husbands to force them to agree to religious divorces.

At the same time, the jurors acquitted Epstein’s son, David “Ari” Epstein, of all charges.

Epstein, a prominent rabbi who specializes in divorce proceedings, was on trial along with his son and two other rabbis, Binyamin Stimler and Jay Goldstein, on conspiracy, kidnapping and attempted charges that grew out of a federal undercover sting.

After three full days of deliberations, jurors rejected all kidnapping charges against the men.

The father of nine, grandfather of 45 and great-grandfather of five, Epstein, 69, was found guilty of conspiracy to commit kidnapping but not guilty of an attempted kidnapping charge related to an undercover sting. In that sting, FBI agents secretly recorded conversations in which Epstein boastfully claimed that his “team” kidnaps and beats stubborn husbands until they agree to give their wives religious divorces, known as gets.

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NEW JERSEY
New York Daily News

BY REUVEN BLAU NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

A New Jersey jury found an Orthodox rabbi and two other men guilty of conspiring to kidnap Jewish husbands and violently force them to grant their wives religious divorces.

Prosecutors charged Mendel Epstein, 69, and nine other men who beat and tortured recalcitrant husbands who refused to give their wives a religious divorce called a get. The men used handcuffs, electric cattle prods, surgical blades, screwdrivers and hid their faces.

The maximum sentence for a conspiracy kidnapping charge is life in prison and a $250,000 fine. Sentencing is set for July 15.

During the eight week trial in U.S. District Court in Trenton, prosecutors played secretly recorded conversations between an undercover posing as a wife desperately seeking help to convince her stubborn husband to give her a get.

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NEW JERSEY
CBS New York

TRENTON, N.J. (CBSNewYork) — Three rabbis were convicted in federal court Tuesday of conspiring to kidnap Jewish men in order to force them to grant their wives divorces.

Rabbi Mendel Epstein, 69, of Lakewood, New Jersey; Rabbi Jay Goldstein, 60, of Brooklyn; and Rabbi Binyamin Stimler, 39, also of Brooklyn, were all convicted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping,
according to New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman. Goldstein and Stimler were also convicted of attempted kidnapping.

Epstein’s son, David, was acquitted at trial.

Jurors deliberated for three days after an eight-week trial before Trenton U.S. District Judge Freda L. Wolfson, prosecutors said.

Epstein and his colleagues were accused of employing a kidnap team to force unwilling Jewish husbands to grant a get, or a religious divorce, to their wives.

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NEW JERSEY
Haaretz

Reuters

Three Orthodox Jewish rabbis were convicted in New Jersey on Tuesday of conspiracy to commit kidnapping in a scheme to force men to grant divorces to their unhappy wives under Jewish law.

Two of the rabbis were convicted as well of attempted kidnapping in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, according to the office of one of the defense attorneys.

The case before U.S. District Judge Freda Wolfson hinged in part on the testimony of an undercover FBI agent who posed as an Orthodox Jewish wife seeking a divorce.

Orthodox Jewish women cannot get a divorce unless their husbands consent through a document known as a “get.”

Prosecutors said the rabbis operated a ring that kidnapped or tried to kidnap men and tortured them with beatings and stun guns until they agreed to divorce.

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NEW JERSEY
US News

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — An Orthodox rabbi accused of using brutal tactics to force unwilling Jewish men to divorce their wives was convicted on Tuesday of conspiracy to commit kidnapping.

But the federal jury in Rabbi Mendel Epstein’s case rendered a mixed verdict, acquitting him of attempted kidnapping.

Epstein’s son was acquitted of conspiracy and kidnapping counts. Two other rabbis were convicted of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and attempted kidnapping.

Prosecutors said the rabbi’s team used brutal methods and tools, including handcuffs and electric cattle prods, to torture the men into granting divorces, known as gets.

The defense acknowledged some crimes may have been committed but said Epstein was not part of a kidnapping conspiracy. A defense lawyer argued that Epstein was “puffing and exaggerating” when he talked to undercover FBI agents in a meeting that was recorded on video and shown during the trial.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KSHB

[with video]

Brendaliss Gonzalez

KANSAS CITY – A handful of victims of sexual abuse from several churches around Kansas City met on Tuesday to express relief and hope after hearing about Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation .

However, some want more clarity to how and why Finn left.

“I want him to be asked to resign; I want full accountability,” said Theresa White, who was sexually abused by a priest when she was 17. “I don’t want partial accountability. I don’t want any more smoking mirrors with the church and to own up to the responsibilities to protect children. I want them to be held fully accountable, not partly accountable, and if he’s asked to resign because of this, I think the Pope needs to make it clear that that’s why he was asked to resign.”

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MISSOURI
Fox 4

APRIL 21, 2015, BY JOHN PEPITONE AND SHANNON O’BRIEN

BELTON, Mo. — Many Catholics say they were shocked to wake up to the news Tuesday that Bishop Robert Finn had resigned.

Nearly three years after becoming the highest ranking U.S. Catholic leader convicted in the church’s sex abuse scandal, Pope Francis accepted Finn’s resignation.

The embattled bishop has been under fire ever since he pleaded guilty to failing to report a priest suspected of child abuse, and many ordinary Catholics could not get past that conviction.

“There’s a lot of division that has occurred in the diocese as a result of some of these policies,” said Biagio Mazza of St. Sabina Catholic Church. “A lot of healing, a lot of reconciliation, forgiveness has to be done by people across the board on all sides.”

Catholics increasingly have demanded a crackdown on church leaders who cover up for pedophiles. But some say that’s just one of many actions by Finn that made his removal long overdue.

“I perceive there’s a fear of punishment,” said Donna Ryan of the Sisters of Mercy. “Sometimes he’s a little punitive, rather than listening to people. For years this community has been known because we know how to dialogue, how to accept one another. I feel that he hasn’t quite grown into that yet.”

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UNITED STATES
Whispers in the Loggia

Almost three years since his conviction for failing to report a priest’s trove of child pornography to civil authorities sparked wide calls for his removal from office, at Roman Noon the Pope accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn from the helm of Northwest Missouri’s diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph.

Weeks after the embattled prelate’s 62nd birthday, the move comes eight months after an apostolic visitation was ordered by Rome to gauge the tensions in the diocese, which Finn had led since 2005. Intriguingly, the KC vacancy has occurred as Pope Francis faces fresh calls to act against another prelate mired in controversy over charges of negligence amid his ties to an abuse case: the Chilean Bishop Juan Barros, whose recent arrival in a new see has been dogged by astonishing levels of public protest, all while Barros has been made to travel with riot police and guard dogs.

Back to Finn, the outcry for the bishop’s departure dates to the fallout of the 2012 bench trial that saw him found guilty of negligence in the case of Fr Shawn Ratigan, a local cleric whose explicit photos of young girls in various states of undress were reported to the diocese on their discovery by a technician, but not forwarded to police for several months. While the priest was subsequently charged with several federal counts of producing child pornography and sentenced to 50 years in jail, a local grand jury indicted Finn and the diocese on a single misdemeanor count of failing to report, becoming the first bishop in the English-speaking world to face criminal accountability for his handling of an abuse case.

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MINNESOTA
Canonical Consultation

04/21/2015

Jennifer Haselberger

Almost immediately following this morning’s announcement that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn, the first Catholic bishop to be criminally charged as a result of his mishandling of sexual misconduct by a priest, I started to receive emails from people inquiring as to what I thought this means for us here in the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis (a.k.a the Worst Diocese On Earth). Unfortunately, my thought was, and remains, that it means little if anything for the simple reason that the situation of Bishop Finn, until this morning the Bishop of Kansas City- St Joseph, differs from that of Archbishop John Nienstedt in several important ways.

First, if the Vatican announcement is to be believed, Bishop Finn tendered his resignation following a meeting with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, on April 14 (a development originally reported by the National Catholic Reporter). Archbishop Nienstedt, on the other hand, has steadfastly insisted that he will not resign. Since at present there is no real way to remove a bishop from office if he is unwilling to fall on his sword, Nienstedt’s obstinate refusal to step aside remains a significant impediment to any resolution of the question of governance of the See of Saint Paul and Minneapolis.

Second, Bishop Finn’s removal followed his guilty plea to criminal charges stemming from his failure to report child abuse, in this case child pornography in the possession of Father Shawn Ratigan. To date, Archbishop Nienstedt has not been charged with any crime. The Ramsey County Attorney’s Office is continuing its investigation of the Archdiocese’s handling of sexual misconduct by clergy, and it is possible that charges against Nienstedt or other Archdiocesan employees/clergy might result. Until then, however, Nienstedt is technically free from the most emotionally-charged (and possibly inaccurate) argument made against Bishop Finn- that diocesan safe environment policies would prohibit him from teaching Sunday school in his own diocese because of his guilty plea.

Third, Bishop Finn’s resignation followed an Apostolic Visitation (again, a story originally reported by the National Catholic Reporter). To my knowledge, the only Visitation-related interviews that have taken place in this Archdiocese were regarding the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter. Although Nienstedt has been subject to an internally ordered investigation, and then apparently an investigation into the investigation, none of that has occurred under Vatican auspices or even, if I am not mistaken, with its consent. Many commentators have noted that Pope Francis likes to follow a process, in which case one would expect that an Apostolic Visitation would precede the removal of Archbishop Nienstedt and/or any of his auxiliaries.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KSHB

Andres Gutierrez

KANSAS CITY, Mo – As the world learned of the news of Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation Tuesday, staff members at the National Catholic Reporter in Midtown were not surprised.

One of the paper’s reporters actually saw Finn at the Vatican last week.

During that visit, Finn met with the head of the congregation for bishops. He was asked to resign. In return, he offered his resignation.

The paper adds he came back to Kansas City to prepare the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph for the announcement.

Catholics learned of the news at noon Rome time – 5 a.m. CST.

Finn’s resignation sends a clear message to high-ranking members in the Catholic Church, National Catholic Reporter staff said

“The Vatican taking this action at this point is a signal to bishops that you have the rules, you have the regulations, you have the protocols – you must follow them,” Dennis Coday, editor of the National Catholic Reporter, said. “Here’s a clear violation here, and the Vatican has acted slowly here, but they have acted.”

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CHILE
The Reporter

By EVA VERGARA Associated Press
First Posted: April 21, 2015

SANTIAGO, Chile — Parishioners in a southern Chile diocese are gathering wherever their new bishop appears, but their presence is not the sort of assembly the Catholic Church would expect.

In the month since Bishop Juan Barros was installed in Osorno, the priest has had to sneak out of back exits, call on riot police to shepherd him from the city’s cathedral and coordinate movements with bodyguards and police canine units.

Such is the public routine of the bishop who is denounced by his opponents as having shielded Chile’s most notorious pedophile priest. For his part, Barros says relations are improving.

The appointment of Barros by Pope Francis has unleashed an unprecedented protest, with more than 1,300 church members, 30 diocesan priests and nearly half of Chile’s Parliament sending letters urging the pope to reconsider.

They may be emboldened after Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of a U.S. bishop, Robert Finn, who pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspected abuser, answering calls by victims to hold priests accountable and ensure children are protected.

At least three men say Barros was present when they were sexually molested in the 1980s and 1990s by the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Karadima was sanctioned by the Vatican in 2011 for sexually abusing minors, ordered to live out his life cloistered in a nun’s convent. Barros has said he knew nothing of Karadima’s abuses.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KMBZ

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Five plaintiffs in child sex abuse case against Bishop Finn in the Kansas City – St Joseph Diocese commented on the case this afternoon.

Phil Pisciotta was molested by a priest when he was about 12 years old, but Finn’s departure gives him hope.

None of the five were involved in the Shawn Ratigan case. Attorney Rebecca Randles says she is doing a records search to determine if there are other victims.

Michael Sandridge was molested by a Kansas City priest when he was 13. He didn’t report it for years, and says when he did, there was a price to pay.

Sandridge is the only one of the five victims who is still a devout Catholic.

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CHILE
Bio Bio

[A Mass will be held tomorrow (Wednesday) in opposition to Osorno Bishop Juan Barros. This is the first official Mass held to oppose the prelate and will be led by priest Pedro Kliegel on behalf of the lay movement in Osorno. The Mass will be held at Sacred Heart Church in that city. It is a church that has become a sort of bastion of opposition to Barros. Also expected to attend are priests who signed a letter sent to the Vatican in opposition to Barros. Retired Bishop Juan Luis Ysem of Ancrud said they are not opposed to possibility of an apostolic visitor to analyze the climate of conflict between the faithful and Barros.]

Este miércoles se desarrollará una misa oficial contra el obispo de Osorno Juan Barros. Se trata de la primera eucaristía oficial en rechazo al prelado, la cual será dirigida por el sacerdote Pedro Kliegel, el principal opositor desde la curia osornina, tras petición del movimiento Laico de Osorno.

La actividad se desarrollará en la Iglesia Sagrado Corazón de la ciudad, la cual se ha convertido en una especie de bastión de los opositores a Barros, actividad donde también se espera que asistan los sacerdotes que firmaron la carta que antes que asumiera el obispo de Osorno fue enviada a El Vaticano por el sacerdote Pedro Kliegel, según explicó Mario Vargas, uno de los líderes del movimiento de Laicos y Laicas opositores.

Respecto a la sugerencia hecha por el obispo emérito de Ancud, Juan Luis Ysern, de exigir un visitador apostólico desde el propio Vaticano para analizar el clima de conflicto existente entre una parte de los fieles y Barros, Mario Vargas aseguró que están abiertos a tal posibilidad, la cual sería incluso analizada por algunos sacerdotes locales.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture

By Phil Lawler | Apr 21, 2015

Bishop Finn had to go. When he was convicted on criminal charges, he became the poster boy for the American bishops’ mishandling of the sex-abuse crisis. He was an irresistible target for critics of Catholicism: a walking, talking symbol of episcopal negligence.

The bishop’s defenders have said that he was not properly informed about the Ratigan case. That’s true, but it’s not an adequate defense. They say that his subordinates and counselors gave him bad advice. Also true, but irrelevant. We’ve heard those arguments too many times. The fact remains that when he was alerted to the fact that a troubled priest had engaged in inappropriate activities with young children, Bishop Finn did not take prompt and decisive action. He let the problem fester—as so many other bishops have let so many other problems fester—with disastrous results for everyone involved.

In Bishop Finn’s case this failure was particularly inexcusable because the results of negligence were so very well known. He could not get away with mumbling inanities about a “learning curve,” about not recognizing the severity of pedophilia, as other bishops had done a decade earlier. By 2011, every American bishop should have known that if there was one failure he absolutely must avoid, it was the failure to curb sexual abuse.

The announcement of Bishop Finn’s resignation comes, appropriately, on the same day as the news that the US bishops spent nearly $3 billion in the past decade to settle sex-abuse lawsuits. That reckoning understates the financial cost of the sex-abuse scandal, since it does not include the millions of dollars quietly paid out before 2004. And the financial cost, in turn, does not adequately summarize the staggering damage done to the Church. How many young lives were damaged? How many thousands were alienated from the faith? How many opportunities for evangelization were lost forever?

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
Seattle PI

By BILL DRAPER, Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Bishop Robert Finn, who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri for nearly 10 years, resigned Tuesday, almost three years after he was convicted of shielding an abusive priest.

Back in 2012, Finn admitted that he knew about photos of children on a priest’s laptop six months before the images were turned over to law enforcement. That made him the highest-ranking church official in the U.S. to be convicted of not taking action in response to abuse allegations. A look at key developments in the case against Finn:
___

Aug. 20, 2008 — Finn holds a news conference to apologize for abuse that occurred at the hands of current and former clergy members and vows to make sure such abuse never happens again. The diocese tentatively agrees to pay $10 million to settle 47 pending sexual abuse claims involving 12 priests. The abuse happened between 1951 and 1992.
___

May 19, 2010 — Julie Hess, a Catholic school principal, writes a memo reporting that several people had complained that priest Shawn Ratigan was taking compromising pictures of young children.
___

Dec. 16, 2010 — A computer technician working on Ratigan’s laptop finds multiple images of girls under 12 years old.
___

December 2010 — Ratigan fails to show up for Mass. Deacon goes to Ratigan’s house and finds priest unconscious in his closed garage with motorcycle running. Suicide note found in home says he is sorry for any harm he had caused to church.

Ratigan is hospitalized, then placed in psychiatric care. Finn sends him to Pennsylvania for a mental evaluation but does not inform state of possible child sexual abuse, as required by law.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

“We all know there are other U.S. bishops wondering ‘who is the next?’ ” tweeted Catholic Church historian, Massimo Faggioli, after Pope Francis, likely under pressure from “low tax” US billionaire donors, “dumped” U.S. Bishop Robert Finn. Bishop Finn had became a symbol of the Vatican’s decades’ old stonewalling approach to addressing the priest child sexual abuse crisis. Paradoxically perhaps, frequent bishop defender, Bill Donohue, fairly listed today Finn’s sins, which while detestable, seem almost minor when compared to those reported reliably with respect to many other bishops in the USA and elsewhere. If Finn is sacked, how can the pope justify keeping so many others with “even dirtier hands”? What say you Pope Francis?

Yes, who is next? If the pope fails on curtailing child abuse, he becomes a US political liability, in next year’s US presidential election, for his “low tax-less regulation-least safety net” US billionaire supporters that appear to be depending on him considerably.

Finn was an easy case. Finn is the only U.S. bishop ever convicted in court of failing to report a suspected abuser he supervised, Fr. Shawn Ratigan, who was later sentenced to 50 years on federal child pornography charges. Ratigan had hundreds of lewd pictures of children from local parishes on his computer, and he attempted suicide when the diocese learned of them in 2010. But Finn waited six months to report Ratigan to authorities in violation of a local law. Finn pleaded guilty in 2012 for failing to report Ratigan timely, after a legal battle that cost his diocese over a million dollars. In short, Finn was low-hanging fruit.

The day before Finn’s resignation was announced, the Irish “Joan of Arc” and priest sex abuse survivor, Marie Collins, who is a member of the panel Francis established to address the abuse crisis, reportedly wondered “how anybody like that (Finn) could be left in charge of a diocese.” “Things are moving slowly, as I have said many times, but they are moving in the right direction!” as Marie Collins boldly tweeted Tuesday (April 21) after hearing news of Finn’s resignation. Also, Collins reportedly said this week a plan for hierarchical accountability is on Francis’ desk now. What in God’s name is the pope waiting for?

Francis will be making his first visit to the USA in September, a highly anticipated trip to a crucially powerful and wealthy Church where media mesmerized Catholics have welcomed his new style as much as anywhere. But it’s also a Church whose members have been traumatized by the abuse scandal, which they see as a priority for the pope to curtail, at least as much as the Catholic protesters in Chile appear to see it. Will US Catholics protest similarly in Philadelphia, New York City and/or Washington DC this summer? Who ever expected Chilean Catholics to protest so strongly against their Argentine neighbor, Francesco?

On Finn’s sacking, see also the National Catholic Reporter’s Joshua J. McElwee, Brian Roewe and Dennis Coday report and the informative comments thereto. See also my Electing Bishops & Jeb Bush Too , A Pope, A New US War, Jeb Bush Neocons & Big Oil and Hillary Clinton vs. Pope Francis in 2015 USA Politics .

Will Pope Francis now sack also the bankrupt Minneapolis Archdiocese’s Archbishop John Nienstedt, who is enmeshed in several obscene scandals involving alleged priest child abuse cover-ups and gay relationships with some of his priest subordinates. The child abuse cover ups allegedly also extensively involve Fr. Kevin McDonough, brother of US President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Joshua J. McElwee Brian Roewe Dennis Coday | Apr. 21, 2015

VATICAN CITY AND KANSAS CITY, MO. U.S. Bishop Robert Finn, the Catholic prelate in the U.S. heartland who became a symbol internationally of the church’s failures in addressing the sexual abuse crisis, has resigned. He was the first bishop criminally convicted of mishandling an abusive priest yet remained in office for another two and a half years.

The Vatican announced Finn’s resignation as head of the diocese of St. Joseph-Kansas City, Mo., in a note in its daily news bulletin Tuesday.

While the note did not provide any reason for the move, it is rare for bishops in the Catholic church to resign without cause before they reach the traditional retirement age of 75.

Finn, who is 62 and had led the diocese since 2005, was neither assigned a new diocese nor as yet given a new leadership role in the church.

Other than for reasons of health, only one other bishop among the some 200 U.S. Catholic dioceses and eparchies has resigned his role in such a manner in at least the past decade. …

In February 2014, Kansas City Catholics engaged a canon lawyer and made a formal request that the Vatican initiate a penal process to determine whether Finn violated church law in the case of Shawn Ratigan, a then-priest of the diocese convicted of child pornography charges, whom Finn failed to report to civil authorities.

In September 2014, Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa, Ontario, came to Kansas City for a Vatican investigation known as an apostolic visitation to interview more than a dozen people as part of an investigation into Finn’s leadership.

Prendergast told those he interviewed from Sept. 22-26 that he was there on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.

Smith said in a brief interview Tuesday that Finn had met with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, April 14 in Rome. The bishop, Smith said, then spoke with U.S. apostolic nuncio Archbishop Carlo Vigano on Monday, at which final details of the resignation were determined.

There “probably were conversations that went on all the way up to yesterday about when or how this transition would take place,” Smith said.

The overlap of Finn’s Rome visit with a meeting of the new Vatican commission on clergy sexual abuse on April 12 was a “kind of coincidence,” Smith said. …

Commission member Peter Saunders said in an interview Tuesday that the members discussed Finn’s case at the meeting.

“I believe that there was already some movement on the Finn case, from what Cardinal O’Malley said, so I think this was going to happen,” Saunders said. “But maybe we were in some small way instrumental in ensuring that it did.”

While the Vatican bulletin does not say Finn was removed from office (instead, it says the pope accepted his resignation), such moves are still rare in the church.

The last Catholic prelate to be removed from diocesan office was Paraguayan Bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, whom Francis removed in September mainly over accusations that he had not adequately managed his diocese and had caused strife with other prelates.

The last U.S. bishop who resigned at such an early age was former Scranton, Pa., Bishop Joseph Martino, who resigned in 2009 at age 63 mainly over concerns that he was mismanaging and was divisive in his diocese.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien, the former archbishop of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, Scotland, who resigned in 2013 after admitting to sexual misconduct, on March 20 resigned “the rights and privileges of a cardinal.” Those include advising the pope, holding membership in Vatican congregations and councils, and electing a new pope.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KMBC

By Micheal Mahoney

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —Some Kansas City area Catholics are split after learning of Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation.

After a midday Mass at Redemptorist Church in Kansas City, some said Finn was driven from office.

“They’re not being fair. They’re putting it all on his back and he has people working under him,” said Virginia Vigliaturo.

“Well, it’s unfortunate that it had to come to that, but it was probably the wisest thing the Pope could do,” said Ed Stewart, who attended Mass.

Stewart said he liked Finn, but added he thought is resignation would solve a lot of political problems in the diocese.

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UNITED STATES
Crux

By Michael O’Loughlin
National reporter April 21, 2015

Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, finds himself without a job Tuesday, as Pope Francis accepted the embattled prelate’s resignation three years after his conviction for failing to report suspected child abuse.

The Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests, SNAP, called the move “encouraging,” but said there is still more work to do, describing the resignation as “a very tiny drop of reform in an enormous bucket of horror.”

“Finn’s departure will, in the short term, make some adults happier. By itself, it won’t, in the long term, make many kids safer,” the statement read.

A group that monitors bishops agreed that Finn’s removal was a “good step,” but called on Pope Francis to elaborate on the reasons for Finn’s dismissal.

“But what no pope has done to date is publicly confirm that he removed a culpable bishop because of his failure to make children’s safety his first priority. We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately,” Anne Doyle, a spokesman for BishopAccountability.org, said in a statement. “That would be unprecedented, and it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.” …

Pope Francis is currently considering a proposal from his commission on sex abuse dealing with bishop accountability. The commission has discussed Finn’s case, as well as that of the newly installed Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid of Osorno, Chile, who is tied to one of that country’s most notorious abusers.

A member of that commission, Marie Collins, told Crux in an interview published on Monday that it was time for Finn to go.

“I cannot understand how Bishop Finn is still in position, when anyone else with a conviction that he has could not run a Sunday school in a parish. He wouldn’t pass a background check,” she said. “I don’t know how anybody like that could be left in charge of a diocese.”

But some are standing by Finn.

“Bishop Finn, we love you, your pastoral heart,” a statement from a group called Justice for Bishop Finn read.

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UNITED STATES
Los Angeles Times

By CHRISTINE MAI-DUC contact the reporter

nsas City Bishop Robert W. Finn, the first U.S. Catholic bishop to be convicted for his role in the church’s sex abuse scandals, resigned on Tuesday. Here are the basics on why his departure is so significant:

Finn has faced pressure to step down for years

Finn was convicted in September 2012 of failing to report sexual abuse by one of his priests, Father Shawn Ratigan, whose laptop contained hundreds of images of child pornography. Finn later acknowledged that he and other diocesan officials had known about the photos for five months but did not report Ratigan to police.

A judge found Finn guilty of the misdemeanor charge and sentenced him to two years’ probation, which included extensive training for staff and clergy and creation of a fund for counseling abuse victims.

Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Finn faced pressure to resign following the conviction, including from within his own ranks. An online petition demanding his resignation had been signed by more than 260,000 people. …

A 2002 investigation by the Dallas Morning News identified 109 bishops accused of enabling sexual abuse within the U.S. church. According to 2010 data compiled by BishopAccountability.org, a site that has tracked the abuse scandal, 45 of those bishops named by the Dallas Morning News had retired, 15 were promoted, 12 resigned, and three died in office. One bishop’s role as administrator ended and a new bishop took over.

According to the site, 24 U.S. Catholic bishops have been publicly accused of sexually abusing minors. Of those, four are still working, 16 retired and four died in office. …

“Finn’s resignation will bring short-term relief to thousands of Catholics, and hundreds of victims in Kansas City, but there’s a vast difference between short-term relief and long-term reform,” said David Clohessy, of the Chicago-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. Earlier this year, the Vatican commission appointed to advise the pope on clergy sexual abuse discussed creating consequences for Catholic bishops who don’t follow guidelines for preventing and reporting abuse, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley told the National Catholic Reporter.

Asked in November why Finn had not resigned despite his conviction, O’Malley told “60 Minutes” it was a “question that the Holy See needs to address urgently.”

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UNITED STATES
Christian Science Monitor

[KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Pope Francis accepting the resignation of a bishop who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph in Missouri for nearly 10 years. Bishop Robert Finn was convicted by a judge of failing to report suspected child abuse, but did not plead guilty as the story stated. A corrected version of the story will be sent.

The AP]

By Nicole Winfield and Margaret Stafford, Associated Press APRIL 21, 2015

KANSAS CITY, MO. — Pope Francis accepted the resignation Tuesday of a U.S. bishop who pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspected child abuser, answering calls by victims to take action against bishops who cover up for pedophile priests.

Bishop Robert Finn, who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph in Missouri for nearly 10 years, resigned under canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office. But his resignation did not provide a specific reason.

Finn, 62, is 13 years shy of the normal retirement age of 75.

In 2012, Finn pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failure to report suspected abuse and was sentenced to two years of probation, making him the highest-ranking church official in the U.S. to be convicted of not taking action in response to abuse allegations. …

The removal was praised by Marie Collins, a prominent member of Francis’ own sex abuse advisory board who had called for Finn to go and demanded that the Vatican hold bishops accountable when they fail to protect children.

“Things are moving slowly, as I have said many times, but they are moving in the right direction!” she tweeted. …

Rebecca Randles, the attorney who represented the plaintiffs in several abuse lawsuits that have cost the dioceses millions of dollars, said Finn’s resignation was an important step for abuse victims and the diocese.

“For survivors, there is a sense that as long as Finn was in charge, there would be no way they would have had closure on their own experience. He was a symbol bearer,” she said “And this kind of abuse ripples across all the Catholic faithful.” …

In a statement, Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the online abuse resource BishopAccountability.org, said Finn’sresignation was a welcome step but called on Francis to publicly state that he was removed for mismanaging the Ratigan case and failing to protect children.

She noted that bishops had been allowed to resign under the previous two popes, but that the Vatican has never publicly linked their resignations to mishandling abuse cases.

“We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately. That would be unprecedented,” she said. “And it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.”

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AUSTRALIA
The Morning Bulletin

Austin King | 22nd Apr 2015

THE Sisters of Mercy leader admitted she was less than compassionate when sexual and physical abuse victims first started speaking out.

Not once when the allegations of abuse at Neerkol Orphanage first came to light, did Sister Berneice Loch attempt to contact victims, the Royal Commission panel heard yesterday.

That was the first port of call she should have made, she told the commission.

However, rather than contact the witnesses, who last week gave evidence of physical and sexual abuse at the orphanage which was run by the Sisters of Mercy, Sr Loch instead sought information from other Sisters, congregational personnel and sources.

Sr Loch decided to oversee the drafting of a media release to counteract those “sensationalistic” rumours.

That media release was never distributed; it was only drafted as a “measure” if the allegations got too “out of control”.

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UNITED STATES
Bloomberg

Melinda Henneberger
@MelindaDC

That sigh of relief you hear is the exhalation of all the Kansas City Catholics whose titular leader for the last decade, Bishop Robert Finn, became the first U.S. bishop to be convicted of failing to report a predatory priest to the police 2 ½ years ago. Today, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted Finn’s resignation.

Since September of 2012, the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri diocese had been supervised by someone who couldn’t have taught Sunday school, because he wouldn’t have passed the required background check. And as long as Finn held on to his job, the wider church had a tough time arguing that its tough new standards on protecting children meant bishops could no longer cover up for abusive priests.

Finn was convicted of a misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse in the case of the now-defrocked and incarcerated former Father Shawn Ratigan, who in August of 2012 pled guilty to producing child porn.

The National Catholic Reporter, the independent Kansas City-based paper that has been aggressively reporting on Finn, and calling his ouster, noted that the resignation resonates because “[t]he issue of holding bishops accountable has long been the largest and most provocative unresolved element in the church’s handling of sexual abuse cases. In diocese after diocese and country after country, abuse victims, parents and advocacy groups have asked why bishops who inappropriately handle dangerous priests are rarely, if ever, held accountable.”

They have, however, been held accountable by the small paper, which had been publishing Jason Berry’s groundbreaking stories about clerical sex abuse for a full 20 years before the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer in 2003 for the paper’s coverage of known priest abusers who’d repeatedly reassigned instead of reported to the police.

In this Pulitzer week, when we celebrate the best journalism in the country, including reporting on tax inversions by Bloomberg News reporter Zachary Mider, which on Monday won the 2015 prize for best explanatory reporting, the news of Finn’s ouster is a different kind of validation for NCR, where columnist Michael Sean Winters writes, “This is no time for popping champagne. Everything about the situation—Bishop Finn’s authoritarian manner, his conviction for failing to report child sex abuse, the years of inaction by the Holy See—is the stuff of tragedy.”

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MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio

Madeleine Baran Apr 21, 2015

Pope Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn, who had failed to report a priest who had possessed child pornography. Finn pleaded guilty.

Is the clergy sex abuse scandal in Kansas City similar to the scandal here?

Yes, in general terms. Both Twin Cities Archbishop John Nienstedt and Bishop Robert Finn in Kansas City have been accused of covering up clergy sex abuse.

However, in Kansas City, the cover-up led to a criminal charge against Finn for failing to immediately tell police about a priest caught with child pornography. The case ended when Finn pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge. He was sentenced to two years’ probation in 2012, according to the Associated Press.

Nienstedt has not been criminally charged for his handling of clergy sex abuse. Nienstedt’s role in protecting accused priests was revealed in an investigative series by MPR News in 2013. The reports showed Nienstedt had authorized secret payments to priests accused of sexually abusing children and failed to warn parishioners of sexual misconduct by the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer — a priest who went on to sexually abuse at least two children of a parish employee. Wehmeyer pleaded guilty and is now in prison. MPR News has also reported that Nienstedt gave several false statements in a sworn deposition taken in 2014 as part of a clergy sex abuse lawsuit.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on those who are rejoicing over the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn:
In 2002, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland retired after it was disclosed that he paid $450,000—ripped off from the coffers that service the poor—to his boyfriend; Weakland was accused of raping him years earlier.

Weakland’s multiple offenses, all serious, have not deterred Catholic left-wing malcontents, particularly those at Commonweal, from showering him with praise. Even Weakland’s stunning revelation, made in 2009, that he did not know it was a crime to sexually molest a child, had no effect: his fans were nonplussed. That’s because he is a man of the Left. Bishop Finn, however, is entitled to no slack. That’s because he is an orthodox bishop.

Some of Bishop Finn’s critics have been fair, but many have not. Among the latter are the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), attorneys Jeffrey Anderson and Rebecca Randles, and Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star. They make a good tag-team. Randles, by the way, subsequently sued me and the Catholic League over a bogus libel accusation. But she lost: it was dismissed by the courts on all counts.

In 2011, we submitted a proposed full-page ad to the Kansas City Star that I had written; the cost was $25,000. But once the editors read it, they turned it down. That’s because I had gotten too close to home, exposing their allies for who they are.

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UNITED STATES
Religion News Service – Spiritual Politics

Mark Silk | Apr 21, 2015

“A tiny but belated step forward” is how David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, reacted to the Vatican’s announcement of the resignation of Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn. Yes, it was belated. But it’s a big step forward.

Three-and-a-half years ago Finn was found guilty of the misdemeanor crime of failing to report a priest suspected of child abuse to civil authorities. The way Catholic League President Bill Donohue tells it, Finn behaved correctly — but Donohue, as he has for years in this matter, is blowing smoke.

Finn did exactly what bishops used to do all the time: cover up a priest’s sexually abusive behavior and give the priest another job in the diocese. And he did it in contravention of the American bishops’ own rules. And none of them made a public peep about it.

Sure, it would have been good if the Vatican had gone ahead and given the reason for the resignation. Sure, there are others who deserve Finnistration, such Archbishop Nienstedt in the Twin Cities and the mistakenly ordained Bishop Juan Barros in Chile. And sure, it remains to be seen if, as promised, Rome promulgates tough disciplinary procedures for bishops charged with covering up abuse cases. But none of this should be allowed to minimize the significance of what happened today.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Service

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, who was convicted in 2012 on one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse.

The Vatican announced the bishop’s resignation April 21, specifying it was under the terms of the Code of Canon Law, which says, “A diocesan bishop who has become less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause is earnestly requested to present his resignation from office.”

The Vatican offered no further comment.

The pope’s acceptance of Bishop Finn’s resignation comes after members of the Pontifical Commission for Child Protection announced that one of their priorities was to ensure measures were in place to promote the accountability of bishops in protecting children and upholding the Vatican-approved norms for dealing with accusations of child abuse made against church workers.

In an interview published April 20, Marie Collins, a member of the commission and a survivor of abuse, told the news site Crux, “I cannot understand how Bishop Finn is still in position, when anyone else with a conviction that he has could not run a Sunday school in a parish. He wouldn’t pass a background check.”

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

By David Gibson | Religion News Service April 21

When Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Missouri Bishop Robert Finn, who was convicted three years ago for failing to report a priest suspected of child abuse, the pontiff sent a powerful message to the Catholic Church.

Here are five takeaways from the news, which the Vatican announced on Tuesday (April 21).

1. This is a big deal

During the past decade, the most intense years of the Catholic Church’s long-running clergy sex abuse scandal, thousands of priests have been punished or defrocked for abusing children, and a few bishops found guilty of molestation have also quit.

But until Finn, no American bishop had ever been forced from office (despite the terse Vatican announcement that he “resigned”) for covering up for a predator priest.

That sets a precedent in an institution where many have regarded the hierarchy as a privileged caste that should not be held to the same standards as others in the church. Some feared that if a bishop were pushed out for failing to do his job, it would create a domino effect that could topple the entire superstructure.

“We all know there are other U.S. bishops wondering ‘who is the next?’” tweeted church historian Massimo Faggioli.

But Francis seems to be betting this sort of accountability at the top will strengthen the church, and even help restore the credibility of the bishops.

2. Finn was an easy case

Finn is the only U.S. bishop ever convicted in court of failing to report a suspected abuser, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, who was later sentenced to 50 years on federal child pornography charges.

Ratigan had hundreds of lewd pictures of children from local parishes on his computer, and he attempted suicide when the diocese learned of them in 2010. But Finn waited six months to report Ratigan to authorities.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

VATICAN CITY
Wall Street Journal

By FRANCIS ROCCA
Updated April 21, 2015

ROME—A U.S. bishop convicted of failing to report a priest who had produced child pornography has resigned, amid calls that Pope Francis make church leaders more accountable for their handling of child abuse.

The pope accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City, Mo., under a provision of church law calling for bishops to resign because of “ill health or some other grave cause,” the Vatican announced Tuesday.

Members of a Vatican panel on child abuse have been pressing Pope Francis to dismiss bishops who fail to protect children or punish those under their authority who abuse them. One member of the panel said he would resign if the pope fails to fire a Chilean bishop who has been accused of protecting an abusive priest.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, declined to comment further on the Finn case. A spokesman for the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph also declined to comment, referring to a diocesan statement that quoted Bishop Finn but didn’t address the cause of his resignation. …

Jack Smith, director of communications for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, said Bishop Finn would have no comment beyond his words the diocesan statement. Asked why the bishop had resigned, Mr. Smith said: “You have to assume that this probably stems from the four-year-long struggle over the circumstances of the Father Ratigan case.” …

“He should have been sacked a long time ago, as soon as he was convicted,” said Peter Saunders, an advocate for sex abuse victims who sits on the Vatican advisory body. “He should have been dismissed.”

Mr. Saunders said Pope Francis should now act promptly in the case of Bishop Juan Barros, whom the pope appointed to lead the diocese of Osorno, Chile, in January. Critics have demanded Barros’s ouster over accusations that he had covered up for another priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, who was later punished by the church for sexual abuse. Bishop Barros has denied charges that he witnessed abuse by Father Karadima.

In March, the Vatican said in a statement that the Congregation for Bishops examined the Barros case before his transfer to Osorno and “did not find objective reasons to preclude the appointment.”

Earlier this month, Mr. Saunders and three other members of the child-protection commission traveled to Rome to meet with Cardinal O’Malley and express their concerns about Bishop Barros. The group said in a statement that Cardinal O’Malley had “agreed to present the concerns of the subcommittee to the Holy Father.”

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UNITED STATES
National Survivor Advocates Coalition

National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) Statement on the Acceptance of Bishop Robert Finn’s Resignation by Pope Francis

For Immediate Release – April 21. 2015

Contact: Kristine Ward, Chair, National Survivor Advocates Coalition (NSAC) Kristineward@hotmail. com, 937-272-0308

It’s about time.

The resignation of Bishop Finn as head of the Diocese of Kansas City- St. Joseph is not a moment for applause in the continuing crisis of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

It is a moment to ask why it took so long.

It is a moment to ask when the others who protected and continue to protect abusers will be removed.

It is a moment to ask why there are continuing defenders of bishops and religious superiors for predator priests and religious men and women, and diocesan staffs.

May today’s announcement, terse as it was from the Vatican, give a measure of peace to the survivors.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph

Statement on the Resignation of Bishop Robert W. Finn from the Pastoral Care of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph

April 21, 2015

Today, the Holy Father Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert W. Finn from the pastoral care of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph. At the same time, the Holy Father appointed Kansas City in Kansas Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann as Apostolic Administrator of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph.

As Apostolic Administrator, Archbishop Naumann serves as the episcopal leader of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph until such time as a permanent bishop is appointed. He retains his duties as Archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas.

“It has been an honor and joy for me to serve here among so many good people of faith,” Bishop Robert W. Finn said. “Please begin already to pray for whomever God may call to be the next Bishop of Kansas City – St. Joseph.”

In an open letter to the people of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph, Archbishop Naumann expressed his thanks to the Holy Father for his appointment.

“I have been part of the Kansas City Community for more than 11 years, so I have an awareness of the vitality and beauty of the Catholic community in Northwest Missouri,” Archbishop Naumann said. He prayed that the coming weeks and months will be “a time of grace and healing for the Diocese.”

Archbishop Naumann explained that his time as Administrator will “not be a time for innovation or change, but a time to sustain the ordinary and essential activities of the Church and where possible to advance the initiatives that already are under way.”

Archbishop Naumann prayed that when a new bishop is appointed for Kansas City – St. Joseph, he “will find a community united both in their love for Jesus and His Bride – the Church.”

Finally, he looked forward to the many ordinations to the priesthood to take place in the coming weeks on both sides of the state line, calling it “one of the great signs of the New Springtime in the Church.” Four men will be ordained for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas and nine for the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph.

Archbishop Naumann is scheduled to spend the day engaged with the Administrative Cabinet of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph and the staff at the Catholic Center.

The full text of Archbishop Naumann’s letter to the people of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph is below.

Letter to the People of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph on the Occasion of my Appointment as Apostolic Administrator

By Archbishop Joseph F Naumann
April 21, 2015

I am grateful to the Holy Father for his Appointment to serve as Apostolic Administrator for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, while continuing to serve as the Archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas.

I have been part of the Kansas City Community for more than 11 years, so I have an awareness of the vitality and beauty of the Catholic community in Northwest Missouri. Living in the same media market, I am also keenly conscious of some of challenges and difficulties this Diocese has suffered in recent years.

I pray that the coming weeks and months will be a time of grace and healing for the Diocese. All of us, who are privileged to serve in leadership for the Church, do so for only a season. It is not our Church, but Christ’s Church. We are mere stewards of His Church for a time.

By definition, the role of an Administrator is for a very short season. This will not be a time for innovation or change, but a time to sustain the ordinary and essential activities of the Church and where possible to advance the initiatives that already are under way.

It is my desire to do all that I can to prepare this Diocese to welcome well its new bishop. I pray that your new bishop, when he arrives, will find a community united both in their love for Jesus and His Bride – the Church – as well as eager to proclaim the truth and beauty of His Gospel to the world.

For this to happen, I will need the prayers and support of the Priests, Deacons, Religious, Diocesan and Parish lay staffs, and most importantly the people of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri. I want to be as available as I can, while still fulfilling my responsibilities as the Archbishop of Kansas City in Kansas. I am confident that I can count on the prayerful support of the Priests, Deacons, Religious and Laity of Northeast Kansas to assist me in fulfilling these dual roles to the best of my ability.

One of the great signs of the New Springtime in the Church that we give thanks for on both sides of State Line Road is the increase in recent years of priestly vocations. Both dioceses look forward with eager anticipation in a few weeks to the ordination of many new priests – nine for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph and four for the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas.

One of the great treasures that the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph and the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas share in common is Mary as our primary Patron under her title, the Immaculate Conception.

We seek our Blessed Mother’s intercession that Her Son might bless abundantly the Catholic Community of Northwest Missouri during this time of transition.

Mary, Mother of the Church, place the people of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph under your protective mantle, drawing us closer to your Son, Jesus. Amen.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.

KANSAS CITY (MO)
USA Today

Aamer Madhani, USA TODAY April 21, 2015

Before he became one of the highest profile members of the clergy found complicit in the U.S. Catholic church’s child sex abuse scandal, Bishop Robert Finn had an impressive climb up the church’s hierarchy and established a reputation as one of the church’s most conservative voices.

On Tuesday, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted Finn’s resignation, marking an end to one of the ugliest chapters in the church’s child sexual abuse scandal.

The Vatican did not explain the reason for allowing Finn to resign. He is nearly 13 years short of the normal retirement age for bishops. …

Ahead of his installation as Kansas City bishop, some priests, nuns and church members worried that he was too theologically conservative for the Kansas City-St. Joseph Diocese, according to news reports at the time.

Finn acknowledged that he was one of a handful of bishops in the country who belonged to the Priestly Society of the Holy Cross, the organization for diocesan priest “associates” of Opus Dei, a conservative group that encourages Catholics to practice their Christian principles in their workplaces, according to the Kansas City Star.

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UNITED STATES
Legal Examiner

Posted by Joseph H. Saunders
April 21, 2015

The man who became a symbol of the Catholic Church’s failure to stem the sexual abuse crisis that has plagued it has resigned.

In a news bulletin the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had accepted the resignation of the bishop of Kansas City, Robert W. Finn. The Vatican provided no reason for the resignation, only that Finn was leaving under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office.

In 2012 Finn was found guilty of failing to report suspected child abuse, and became the first American bishop in the decades-long sexual abuse scandal to be convicted of shielding a pedophile priest. The counts each carried a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $1,000 fine, but Bishop Finn was sentenced to two years of court-supervised probation. In 2014 Roman Catholics based in Kansas City took the rare step of petitioning Pope Francis to discipline Bishop Finn and asked for his removal. The Vatican received the petition, signed by more than 113,000 people, with no public comments or actions.

The resignation of Finn is a positive step, but a small one. Let us not forget that for centuries the Catholic Church has institutionally worked to cover up sex abuse committed by priests with an agenda of denials and attacking the accusers. Finn knew priests who were abusing children yet chose to protect the abusers rather than their victims. It is a tragic scenario that has played itself out time and time again. How many other Bishops chose the same path of action? How many cases of sexual abuse have been covered up?

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VATIKAN
Deutsche Welle

Papst Franziskus habe den Amtsverzicht des amerikanischen Bischofs Robert Finn gebilligt, so die kurze Mitteilung des Vatikans. Genaue Gründe wurden in Rom nicht genannt. Der 62-jährige Geistliche habe um seinen Rücktritt gebeten unter den kirchlichen Regeln, die dies mit Hinweis auf eine Erkrankung oder “schwerwiegende Gründe” möglich machten. Finn, der die Diözese von Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri führt, hatte die Polizei erst nach sechs Monaten darüber informiert, dass einer seiner Priester Hunderte kinderpornografischer Fotos auf seinem Computer gespeichert hatte.

Die Hinweise waren von einem Techniker gekommen. Der Finn unterstellte pädophile Geistliche ist wegen Kinderpornografie zu 50 Jahren Haft verurteilt worden. Finn selbst erhielt 2012 eine Bewährungsstrafe von zwei Jahren, blieb aber zunächst im Amt. Er ist der einzige Bischof, der in den USA bisher gerichtlich für die Vertuschung von sexuellem Missbrauch zur Verantwortung gezogen wurde. …

Die Entscheidung des Papstes, Finn zu verabschieden, wurde von Kritikern begrüßt, aber als halbherzig gerügt. “Nur ein Anfang” und noch “keine bedeutsame Wende” in der päpstlichen Haltung, meinte etwa Anne Barrett Doyle von der Online-Plattform “BishopAccountability.org”, die Daten über sexuellen Missbrauch in der kathlischen Kirche sammelt. Franziskus lasse ein klares Urteil vermissen.

Selbst der Bostoner Kardinal Sean O’Malley, Vorsitzender des päpstlichen Komitees gegen Missbrauch, hatte im vergangenen Jahr öffentlich gefordert, der Vatikan müsse dringend erklären, warum Finn immer noch im Amt sei.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

BY PHILIP PULLELLA

Finn of Kansas City, who remained in office for three years after he was convicted in 2012 of shielding a priest who took pornographic pictures of girls, has resigned, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

Finn, 62, is the only U.S. Roman Catholic bishop to be convicted for not reporting suspicions of pedophilia. Groups representing victims of abuse by clerics had been urging the pope to dismiss Finn.

“Pope Francis’s removal of (Finn) is a good step but just a beginning,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a resource center for sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church.

“The pope must show that this decision represents a meaningful shift in papal practice, that it signals a new era in bishop accountability,” she told Reuters in an email. …

Barrett Doyle urged the pope to confirm that Finn was removed for failing to make children’s safety a top priority.

“That would be unprecedented, and it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun,” she said.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, head of a commission advising the pope on how to rid the Church of sexual abuse, told CBS television last year that the Vatican “needs to address urgently” the question of why Finn was still in office.

Francis has also come under pressure to remove Juan Barros as bishop of the Chilean city of Osorno. Parishioners, national legislators and abuse victims have accused Barros of having protected one of the nation’s most notorious pedophiles.

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UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave

Kevin O’Brien

This was a long time coming and is a welcome relief – The Pope has accepted the resignation of Bishop Finn of Kansas City.

I’ve decided to turn comments off on this post. I really don’t want to read indignant Catholics who think this was the result of a liberal conspiracy against poor, persecuted, “conservative” Finn. Read my two dozen or so posts about the situation, or go straight to the source and read the Graves Report, the independent investigation into how Finn covered up for and enabled the sexual abuse of children in his diocese. Step away from the right / left factional split for a while and simply look at the facts. Finn should have been removed long ago.

I suspect Bishop Barros in Chile will be asked to resign as well if the situation there continues to fester.

It is perhaps naive to hope that our bishops can be good, holy Christians. It is, however, incumbent upon us to demand that they be decent, trustworthy human beings.

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UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave

Kevin O’Brien

This was my first post on Bishop Finn. It’s from October 23, 2011. Since this post, Fr. Ratigan was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison. Bishop Finn spent $1.4 million of diocesan money to defend himself, but was also convicted in criminal court of failure to report child abuse; he was placed on probation and fined. He has been serving as bishop of Kansas City ever since his conviction, though such a conviction would have prevented him from even being a crossing guard at a public school. He finally resigned today, under pressure from the Vatican.

The Catholic Defense League and Opus Dei and some of Finn’s fellow bishops shamed themselves by vigorously defending Bishop Finn, and in the case of the Catholic Defense League, spinning the story to a point where the facts of the case were utterly distorted.

My original post garnered 99 comments, some of them very angry at me for daring to attack a doctrinally orthodox bishop. It remains the third most read post in the history of this blog. It deserves reposting today, but I’m not allowing comments. My entire series of posts on Finn, written in the 3 1/2 years since the one below, can be read here.

***

“Let’s step outside and settle this thing like men,” she said, and she was a lady. “You’re spewing anti-Catholic rhetoric!” he insisted. “How can you criticize a bishop when you’re an actor and everyone knows actors are perverts and nitwits,” she screamed. (That last gal had a point).

These are all reactions to my post last week about Rod Dreher’s article on Bishop Finn’s Indictment.

And above all, people are charging me with believing the biased media coverage of the scandal.

This, at least, is not true. In fact, everything I say in this post will be taken not from a media account of the scandal, but from the independent report on it as commissioned by the diocese, the Graves Report, which you can read on your own here.

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VATICAN CITY
Time

Elizabeth Dias @elizabethjdias

The Vatican’s announcement that Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, Missouri, was just one line, released in Tuesday’s daily press bulletin. The only reason given was a provision of canon law that allows bishops to resign early due to illness or another grave cause. But everybody knew the real punch: this was the first time a pope took public action against a priest who covered up sexual abuse.

Today’s Francis fever and sky-high favorability ratings makes it easy to forget just how deeply the story of priestly sexual abuse has defined the Catholic Church in recent decades. The legacy of the scandals in the United States alone is beyond weighty — a 2004 USCCB report detailed the severity of the crisis nationwide — more than 4,000 priests faced more than 10,000 allegations of child sexual abuse from 1950-2002, with half the alleged victims between the ages of 11-14. Dioceses have shelled out millions, and in some cases hundreds of millions, of dollars to settle cases.

For many victims and Vatican watchers, Tuesday’s announcement was a long time in coming, especially since Francis made it clear from the beginning that his papacy would have a zero-tolerance policy. In February 2014, Catholics petitioned Pope Francis to take disciplinary action against Finn. Pope Francis launched an investigation into Finn in September, and in November, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who leads the Church sex abuse commission, said that the Vatican needed to “urgently” address Finn’s case. This past weekend, Irish abuse survivor and member of the sex abuse commission Marie Collins told the Catholic news site Crux, “I cannot understand how Bishop Finn is still in position, when anyone else with a conviction that he has could not run a Sunday school in a parish. He wouldn’t pass a background check.”

It is one thing for Francis to accept the resignation of a bishop who mishandled abuse allegations. It is another for him to appoint and defend one who has long been associated with similar scandal. Protests erupted in January when Francis announced he was appointing Bishop Juan Barros to lead a Chilean diocese. Barros has long been accused of covering up the sexual abuse committed by his mentor, Rev. Fernando Karadima, whom the Vatican found guilty of in 2011. Members of the sex abuse commission have been speaking out in concern in this case as well. “It goes completely against what he (Francis) has said in the past about those who protect abusers,” Collins told the AP last month. “The voice of the survivors is being ignored.”

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star

Reaction to the announcement that Pope Francis had accepted Bishop Robert W. Finn’s resignation ranged across a wide spectrum Tuesday.

“There are some groups that I know are elated and overjoyed and there are some groups that are saddened by it. I think he did what he felt best for the diocese under the circumstances. I wish him the best and I will continue to pray for him.”

| Mike Murtha, a Finn supporter who has attended St. John Francis Regis Catholic Church in south Kansas City.

“Pope Francis’s removal of Bishop Robert Finn … is a good step but just a beginning. The pope must show that this decision represents a meaningful shift in papal practice — that it signals a new era in bishop accountability. But what no pope has done to date is publicly confirm that he removed a culpable bishop because of his failure to make children’s safety his first priority. We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately. That … would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.”

| Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director, BishopAccountability.org, a group that tracks the abuse crisis in the Catholic church.

“I still admire him deeply. I am saddened about his resignation and I feel a great deal of sympathy for him.… In the end, he got caught up in the cross currents of Vatican II. He did things differently than what a lot of people wanted…. He wasn’t like a political bishop but he was a holy bishop and he made some mistakes I found not so easy to forgive at first but I realized that he didn’t do this intentionally, it was a mistake and I wish the community could have forgiven him.…I know from the very beginning that in his heart, he was very hurt by his mistakes and the mistakes of diocese in how they handled it. He is a really good man and I really feel for him.”

| Jim Dougherty, a former Kansas City resident who now serves as a church deacon in Hawaii.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
APRIL 21, 2015

Three years after Bishop Robert W. Finn became the first Roman Catholic prelate to be convicted of failing to report a pedophile priest, he resigned on Tuesday as head of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in northern and western Missouri.

The move comes as Pope Francis is facing mounting pressure from the faithful and from members of his own sexual abuse commission to show that he is serious about keeping bishops accountable when they have shielded or mishandled child abusers.

Parishioners and priests in Bishop Finn’s diocese had been petitioning the Vatican since he was convicted of shielding a priest discovered with child pornography on his laptop, saying that the bishop no longer had the credibility to lead. In the last month, Catholics in Chile have been bitterly protesting Francis’ decision to install Bishop Juan Barros in the diocese of Osorno despite claims that he witnessed abuse years ago and did nothing.

Such a resignation is extremely rare when a bishop is not ill or close to the retirement age of 75. Bishop Finn is 62 and has served in his diocese just short of 10 years. …

Jeff Weis, a parishioner who helped to lead the petition campaign pushing for Bishop Finn’s removal, said in a statement, that with the resignation, “the prayers of this hurt community have been answered.” But he added: “The damage done is immeasurable. The time necessary to heal will be long.”

Christopher Bellitto, an associate professor of history at Kean University in New Jersey, said, “It’s two steps forward for credibility, but one step back because it took too long.”

The removal of Bishop Finn will put pressure on Pope Francis to act against Bishop Barros in Chile, said Anne Barrett Doyle, a director of BishopAccountability.org, an advocacy group that maintains an online database of sexual abuse cases. She said that, as with Bishop Finn, no pope has ever confirmed that the reason for a bishop’s removal was negligence in handling child abuse cases.

“We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately,” Ms. Doyle said. “That would be unprecedented, and it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.”

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UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

And, of course, the big news in the Catholic church in the U.S. today: the convicted felon who was bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Robert Finn, has just resigned. As Laurie Goodstein reports for New York Times,

Such a resignation is extremely rare when a bishop is not ill or close to the retirement age of 75. Bishop Finn is 62 and has served in his diocese just short of 10 years.

The Vatican announced the resignation in a brief note in its daily news bulletin Tuesday, and did not give a reason. But the Vatican cited a provision in church law under which a bishop is “earnestly requested” to resign because of ill health or “some other grave cause.”

As she notes, Pope Francis (who will be visiting the U.S. this year, and would certainly have had to field serious questions about the fact that Finn had remained in his episcopal seat after having been convicted of placing children at risk by shielding a priest he knew to be a pedophile) has been under mounting pressure to show that he’s serious about addressing the abuse crisis. Goodstein quotes Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, who notes that no pope has ever issued a statement indicating that the reason a bishop has been removed was his record in covering up child abuse.

Doyle states,

We urge Pope Francis to issue such a statement immediately. That would be unprecedented, and it would send a bracing message to bishops and religious superiors worldwide that a new era has begun.

David Clohessy of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) notes that, though Finn’s resignation is a step forward, it’s a small step, since the abuse crisis (and cover-up) in the Catholic church vastly transcends any single bishop. Clohessy writes,

After centuries of abuse and cover up done in secrecy, and decades of abuse and cover up done somewhat in public, one pope has finally seen fit to oust one bishop for complicity in clergy sex crimes. That’s encouraging. But it’s only a very tiny drop of reform in an enormous bucket of horror.
Finn’s departure will, in the short term, make some adults happier. By itself, it won’t, in the long term, make many kids safer.

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UNITED STATES
Catholic League

Bill Donohue comments on the resignation of Kansas City-St. Joseph Bishop Robert Finn:

In 2012, Bishop Finn was found guilty of a misdemeanor for failing to report Fr. Shawn Ratigan to the authorities once he learned of sexually explicit images of minors on his computer. The Catholic League defended him against his critics, some of whom were vicious, and it is worth repeating why.

* In 2010, a computer technician found disturbing crotch-shot photos of girls fully clothed on Ratigan’s computer; there was one naked photo of a non-sexual nature.

* Even though there was no complainant, a police officer and an attorney were contacted by diocesan officials. They both agreed that the single naked photo did not constitute pornography.

* After Ratigan attempted suicide, he was evaluated by a psychiatrist—at the request of Finn. Ratigan was diagnosed as depressed, but was not a pedophile.

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CIUDAD DEL VATICANO
KPMR

(ENTRAVISION).- El Papa Francisco aceptó la renuncia del exobispo Robert Finn, quien se declaró culpable de encubrir a un sacerdote que cometía abuso infantil.

Finn encabezaba la Diócesis de Kansas City, Missouri. Dejó pasar al menos seis meses antes de denunciar ante la Policía al reverendo Shawn Ratigan, quien tenía en su computadora cientos de fotografías lascivas de niñas.

Las imágenes fueron tomadas dentro y cerca de iglesias donde trabajó y por producir pornografía infantil Ratigan fue sentenciado a 50 años en prisión. Mientras que el obispo Finn recibió una condena condicional de 2 años en 2012.

El Vaticano declaró que se acepta la renuncia bajo el derecho canónico que permite a los obispos retirarse antes de los 75 años por enfermedad o por alguna razón grave que les impida seguir al frente de la comunidad.

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UNITED STATES
Deutsche Welle

An American bishop has resigned after he failed to report a priest who was found in possession of child pornography. However, child abuse victims see the Vatican’s lack of action as too little, too late.

Pope Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of an American bishop convicted of failing to report a priest who in 2012 was found possession of child pornography.

Bishop Robert Finn, who led the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, waited six months before reporting Shawn Ratigan, a former priest under Finn’s authority, to the police. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges while Finn received two years of probation.

Finn was the subject of an investigation launched by the Vatican in September as part of Francis’ crackdown on child abuse and pedophilia in the Roman Catholic Church.

A statement from the Vatican noted that the bishop resigned under the code of canon which allows bishops to resign early due to “grave” circumstances or illness. However, a reason was not provided for the resignation. Once appointed, bishops generally hold their office for life. …

In lieu of the Vatican’s inaction, more than half a million people signed an online petition demanding Finn’s removal from office. Abuse victims also called on the Vatican to hold bishops suspected of hiding abuse accountable along with perpetrators. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child slammed the Vatican’s child abuse record in a 2014 report, saying they were “gravely concerned.”

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UNITED STATES
dotCommonweal

Grant Gallicho April 21, 2015

In a one-sentence bulletin released this morning, the Vatican announced that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, who was convicted of failing to report child abuse in 2012, has resigned. Pope Francis accepted Finn’s resignation “in conformity with canon 401, paragraph 2”–the statute that covers bishops who cannot fulfill their duties because of poor health or “other grave reasons.” News of the resignation follows months of speculation, which had intensified over the past week, that Pope Francis was poised to remove Finn. In September 2014, the National Catholic Reporter revealed that a Canadian bishop had been sent by the Holy See to Kansas City to investigate Finn’s leadership. Just last November, Cardinal Seán O’Malley of Boston, president of the pope’s new commission on child protection, told 60 Minutes that the Holy See had to “address urgently” the case of Robert Finn. Less than six months later, Pope Francis has done just that.

What might it mean?

1. Yes, Pope Francis is serious about accountability for bishops. Pope Francis’s early comments on the sexual-abuse scandal were hardly encouraging. But before long he sent a message to the world’s bishops asking them to get behind his new commission for the protection of minors. Over the past year, some members of that commission have suggested that they would walk if they didn’t see accountability for bishops who enabled abusers. They had seen the pope move against the so-called Bishop of Bling for financial mismanagement. They knew that he had ousted Bishop Livieres in Paraguay, but the Holy See’s statements about that decision curiously avoided acknowledging that it had anything to do with the fact that Livieres had promoted a priest long accused of sexual misconduct. More recently, two members of the pope’s child-protection commission openly criticized his decision to appoint Chilean Bishop Juan Barros to a new diocese, despite allegations that he had covered up–and witnessed–acts of abuse committed by his mentor. Just yesterday, one of those commission members, Marie Collins, told Crux that the pope was considering a proposal on bishop accountability. She even name-checked Finn: “I cannot understand how Bishop Finn is still in position, when anyone else with a conviction that he has could not run a Sunday school in a parish.” That won’t be a problem anymore.

2. In one sense, this call was a no-brainer. After all, Finn is the only bishop to be convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse–the crime that drove the scandal. If he were a regular Catholic offering to volunteer at a parish, as Collins has pointed out, he wouldn’t even pass the mandated background check. Finn broke trust with his people, which is why he lost so many of them. One Kansas City man, a Communion minister, told NPR that he refuses to pray for Finn during the Eucharistic prayer, “because he’s not my bishop, as far as I’m concerned.” Since Finn took over in 2005, his diocese has lost a quarter of its Catholics, according to Michael Sean Winters.

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UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism

Jerry Slevin

Pope Francis under international pressure “sacked” U.S. Bishop Robert Finn, who became a symbol of the Vatican’s stonewalling in addressing the priest sexual abuse crisis. Finn was the first bishop criminally convicted of mishandling an abusive priest. The child pornographer priest is serving a 50 year sentence in a US federal prison after an aggressive prosecution by President Obama’s Justice Department. Yet Finn remained in office for another three years — over two years under Pope Francis!

Francis has now been forced to set a precedent — criminally convicted bishops who protect predatory priests will be removed by the pope. So Francis must now try to make sure US Federal prosecutors avoid aggressively pursuing cases that may lead to bishops’ criminal actions and convictions as happened with Finn. Now Francis must continue his two predecessors’ efforts to maintain a protective alliance with right wing US Presidents (anyone but new grandmother, Hillary Clinton) as his predecessors withad done effectively with the Bush presidents. Still active Cardinal Angelo Sodano even confidently asked George W. Bush’s Secretary of State for help in stopping US proceedings involving the Vatican’s role in facilitating priest child abuse, after the ex-pope, Sodano and Cardinal Raymond Burke helped in 2004 re-elect GWB despite his disastrous Iraq War that led to over a million deaths and over $5 trillion in unnecessary expenditures so far.

First, Francis must, it appears, help get a right wing US president elected next year before the pope retires, as I expect he will do after the US elections. Francis is doing all he can evidently to draw out key right wing US voters with his appeals to fundamentalist US Latinos and evangelicals (e.g., crusades against gay marriage and contraception insurance coverage, adding Hispanic saints like Archbishop Romero and Junipero Serra, targeted references to Our Lady of Guadalupe and the devil, calling for another Middle East war to benefit Big Oil, etc.). Sacking Finn was therefore critical for Pope Francis’ election crusades, especially after his mishandling of the Bishop Barros’ appointment that led to the Chile revolt. Pope Francis has evidently carefully avoided the Barros subject publicly, even though he reportedly was involved in Barros’ appointment and likely knows him. Please see the superb and relevant analysis, “Vatican Defends the Chilean Appointment” here, BishopAccountability.org .

Francis acted barely a week after Marie Collins had her anti-climatic “non-meeting” with the pope. She wanted to discuss with Pope Francis his outrageous choice to make Juan Barros, who has been accused of helping shield a fellow priest abusing youths (including Juan Carlos Cruz), as the new bishop of Osorno, Chile. Barros’ bishop installation ceremony triggered unprecedented violent protests of thousands in majority Catholic Chile (see here, here, and here).

The Finn sacking shows that Marie Collins’ tenacity points to serious trouble after the Chile revolt for the pope’s upcoming visit to Philly, a key part of his evident and unfolding strategy to elect next year a “Vatican/US bishop friendly” right wing US president, with Jeb Bush the pope’s evident top choice. If the pope fails on curtailing child abuse, he becomes a US political liability. See my “Why Is Pope For A New US War That Aids Bush Neocons & Big Oil Mainly?” here, Christian Catholicism .

On cue, the US right wing media appear to have initiated attention to the anticipated 2016 USA national election alliance of the Vatican and Jeb Bush. This apparently will be a “reunion” for the Bush family and longtime Vatican power, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, and his clique. This seems evident in Jeb’s recent interview (with even a smiling Sodano-Jeb photo) by the National Review Online, “On the 20th Anniversary of His Conversion, Jeb Bush Talks Pope Francis and How to Win on Social Issues“, here, National Review.

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CANADA
Calgary Herald

REID SOUTHWICK, CALGARY HERALD

Published on: April 20, 2015

Child abuse investigators have charged a former pastor in connection with alleged sexual assaults dating back to 1994.

The charges came after a person contacted police to report a series of sexual assaults that allegedly occurred during counselling sessions with a pastor.

The person has reported 50 to 60 cases of assault, including sexual touching and molestation, Staff Sgt. Robert Rutledge said.

They occurred over a nearly two year period, beginning in 1994 when the alleged victim was 11 years old, Rutledge said.

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MINNESOTA
Reuters

BY JIM CHRISTIE

(Reuters) – A U.S. Bankruptcy judge has ruled victims of clergy sex abuse do not have to publicly disclose the value of their claims against a bankrupt Minnesota archdiocese in a defeat for a newspaper publisher.

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Kressel approved on Friday a proof of claim form in the case of the Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis requiring individuals who want to make their claim of clergy sex abuse public to affirm that by checking a box.

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UNITED STATES
The New York Times

The Vatican on Tuesday accepted the resignation of a Missouri bishop who failed to report suspected child abuse and who became the highest-ranking American church official found guilty of a crime related to the church’s child sexual abuse scandal.

The Vatican said that Bishop Robert W. Finn, who leads the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in northern and western Missouri, had offered his resignation under a provision in canon law that allowed bishops to resign early for an illness or if they are unfit to carry out their duties.

Bishop Finn was found guilty in September 2012 of waiting six months before notifying the police about a diocesan priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, who had taken hundreds of pornographic pictures of young girls in and around churches where he worked. Father Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges.

The bishop’s conviction was considered a watershed moment in the sexual abuse scandal that has tarnished the church since the 1980s. Bishops have been eager to turn the page on this era and have put in place extensive abuse prevention policies, which include reporting those suspected of abuse to law enforcement authorities.

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VATICAN CITY
CNN

By Greg Botelho, CNN

(CNN) Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn, who led the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri, and was convicted of failure to report suspected child abuse in 2012, the Vatican said in a statement Tuesday.

At the time of his conviction, Finn was the highest-ranking Catholic official to be convicted during the church’s long sexual abuse scandal.

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VATICAN CITY
The Guardian (UK)

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Rome
Tuesday 21 April 2015

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a bishop who was convicted three years ago of protecting a sexually abusive priest, the Vatican announced on Tuesday.

Robert Finn, of Kansas City diocese, had long been seen as the poster child of the Vatican’s failure to adequately address sex abuse. He was the highest ranking US church official to have been found guilty of an abuse-related crime, but had not been made by the church to suffer any consequences for that verdict.

The resignation was announced by the Holy See as Pope Francis came under intense pressure in a separate case involving Bishop Juan Barros of Chile, who has also been accused of shielding a paedophile priest.

The Vatican’s daily news bulletin, which revealed Finn’s resignation, said: “The Holy Father has accepted the resignation from the pastoral government of the diocese of St Joseph-Kansas City, Mo (United States) presented His Excellency Bishop Robert Finn.”

Finn will retain the title of bishop but will no longer lead the Kansas City diocese. Such abrupt resignations are exceedingly rare. Over the past decade, only one bishop among 200 in US diocese have resigned in a similar fashion, according to the National Catholic Reporter, a media outlet which closely follows the Vatican.

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AUSTRALIA
WA Today

April 21, 2015

Elissa Blake
Arts writer

Set in an exclusive Catholic boys’ school rocked by accusations of sexual abuse, a new play, Vice, which is about to open at the King Street Theatre in Newtown, is an investigation into the “blurring of borders”, playwright Melvyn Morrow says.

“It’s a frightful, delicate and tragically topical subject and when you read about these things happening, everybody feels like they are an expert on the subject because they went to school as well,” Morrow explains. “I thought it would be interesting to show what life is like in a school and how teachers deal with moments when they are, for one reason or another, compromised.”

Morrow, 73, is best known for his work on The Mavis Bramston Show in the 1960s and the scripts for the jukebox musicals Dusty and Shout!.

He is also a career teacher, having taught English and drama in Europe, England and Sydney at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview, which was recently subject to accusations of sexual abuse levelled by a former student dating back some 30 years.

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NIEDERLANDE
kath.net

[In the Netherlands, about 1,000 Catholic Churches are closing. The number of practicing believers has declined dramatically in recent years and makes this step necessary.]

In den Niederlanden stehen etwa 1.000 katholische Kirchen vor der Schließung. Die Zahl der praktizierenden Gläubigen hat in den letzten Jahren dramatisch abgenommen und macht diesen Schritt notwendig.

Die niederländischen Katholiken würden sich auf eine „Zukunft ohne Kirchen“ einstellen, berichtet Radio Vatikan. Kardinal Willem Eijk, der Erzbischof von Utrecht und Vorsitzender der niederländischen Bischofskonferenz, hat in seinem Hirtenbrief zur Fastenzeit angekündigt, etwa 1.000 katholische Kirchen schließen zu müssen.

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VATIKAN
Radio Vatikan

Ein US-Bischof, der sich der Vertuschung von Kindesmissbrauch schuldig gemacht haben soll, tritt zurück. Wie der Vatikan am Dienstag mitteilte, hat Papst Franziskus den Amtsverzicht des 62-jährigen Robert W. Finn, Bischof von Kansas City–Saint Joseph, angenommen. Finn war 2012 zu einer Bewährungsstrafe verurteilt worden, weil er nach Erkenntnissen des Gerichts einen Priester gedeckt hatte, der kinderpornografisches Material besaß. Katholische Gläubige forderten wiederholt die Absetzung des Bischofs. Nach Angaben des „National Catholic Reporter“ fand im September 2014 eine vom Vatikan angeordnete Apostolischen Visitation statt, die die Vorgänge untersuchen sollte.

Der Papst nahm den Rücktritt des Bischofs an diesem Dienstag nach Paragraph 401 §2 des Kirchenrechts an. Das bedeutet, dass der Bischof „aus gesundheitlichen oder anderen schwerwiegenden Gründen“ die Leitung der Diözese aufgibt. Nähere Angaben wurden – wie bei Rücktritten üblich – nicht gemacht.

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VATIKAN
Tages Anzeiger

21.04.2015

Papst Franziskus hat den Bischof der US-Diözese Kansas-St.Joseph wegen Nachlässigkeit bei der Verfolgung von Kinderpornografie entlassen. Der Papst habe das Rücktrittsgesuch von Bischof Robert Finn akzeptiert, teilte der Vatikan am Dienstag mit. Der Geistliche habe sein Fehlverhalten eingeräumt.

Finn hatte die Polizei erst nach sechs Monaten darüber informiert, dass einer seiner Priester junge Mädchen aus den von ihm betreuten Gemeinden auf Hunderten obszönen Fotos abgelichtet und die Bilder auf seinem Computer gespeichert hatte. Der Mann wurde inzwischen wegen Kinderpornografie zu 50 Jahren Haft verurteilt. Die Opfer forderten aber auch eine Bestrafung Finns, der die Taten gedeckt habe.

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VATICAN CITY
International Business Times

By Suman Varandani @suman09 s.varandani@ibtimes.com on April 21 2015

Pope Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn, the U.S. bishop who had pleaded guilty in 2012 for not reporting a suspected child abuser, the Associated Press (AP) reported. The news comes as part of the first known case of a pope’s crackdown on a bishop who covered up for a pedophile.

Finn did not report for six months the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of pornographic images of children taken around churches where he worked, according to AP. Ratigan, who pleaded guilty to child pornography charges, was sentenced to 50 years in prison in September 2013.

The 62-year-old Finn, who leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for covering up for Ratigan, and was sentenced to two years of probation in 2012. Since then, local church-goers have pressurized him to step down and the case sparked outrage and fuelled anger among the victims over the delay being made to remove him from his position.

Finn offered his resignation under the code of canon law, which allows bishops to resign early because of an illness or due to some “grave” reason that makes them unsuitable to continue work, the Vatican said Tuesday, according to AP.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
The Kansas City Star

BY JUDY L. THOMAS
JTHOMAS@KCSTAR.COM AND MARK MORRIS
04/21/2015

Bishop Robert W. Finn, whose nearly 10-year tenure as leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph was marred by child sex abuse scandals, has stepped down.

Pope Francis accepted Finn’s resignation Tuesday, about a week after Finn made a short visit to Rome.

Finn offered his resignation under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office, the Vatican announced. The Vatican did not release a reason, if any, cited by Finn.

Finn is 62, some 13 years shy of the normal retirement age of 75.

“It has been an honor and joy for me to serve here among so many good people of faith,” Finn said in a statement released Tuesday by the diocese. “Please begin already to pray for whomever God may call to be the next bishop of Kansas City-St. Joseph.”

Kansas City in Kansas Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann will serve as apostolic administrator of the Missouri diocese until a new bishop is appointed, according to an announcement by the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese.

Naumann, who was scheduled to spend Tuesday with staff at the Kansas City diocesan offices, will retain his Kansas duties.

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UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter

Michael Sean Winters | Apr. 21, 2015 Distinctly Catholic

The terseness of the official statement was in direct proportion to its gravity. This morning, as I do every morning, I went to the Vatican website, clicked on the daily bulletin, then clicked on rinunce e nomine and found this:

Il Santo Padre Francesco ha accettato la rinuncia al governo pastorale della diocesi di Kansas City-Saint Joseph (U.S.A.), presentata da S.E. Mons. Robert W. Finn, in conformità al can. 401 § 2 del Codice di Diritto Canonico.

There it was. The long nightmare that has engulfed the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph is over. The people of that diocese, whose numbers have shrunk by one quarter since Bishop Finn took the reins of the diocese in 2005, can now begin healing the wounds his leadership caused and, by the grace of God, rebuilding the once vibrant local church.

This is no time for popping champagne. Everything about the situation – from Bishop Finn’s authoritarian manner to his conviction for failing to report child sex abuse to the years of inaction by the Holy See – all of it is the stuff of tragedy. But, it is tragedy of a specific kind. We say that a hurricane or a tornado, a force of nature or act of God that causes great harm and suffering, is a tragedy. But, this is more of a Shakespearean tragedy in which the central character has a fatal flaw that, as the plot unfolds, brings about his ruin. In this case, the fatal flaw was hubris.

As my colleagues Joshua McElwee, Brian Roewe and Dennis Coday report, when Finn took the reins in Kansas City, he began sacking long-time staff, shut down offices he did not like, and he vowed to increase vocations. As is typical of many Midwestern dioceses, Kansas City had a long tradition of lay involvement in the workings of the diocese, dating back long before the Second Vatican Council and its emphasis on the priesthood of the baptized. That tradition was ignored. Lines were drawn between the culture of the Church and the ambient culture. One wonders if +Finn was so isolated and insulated, he even knew how damaging his “bull in a china shop” methods were. Certainly, they did not build up the unity of the local Church which must rank high on any bishops’ list of priorities. But, he did not reverse course. He did not begin consultations. He sought and received the advice of people who already agreed with him. The isolation grew. The disaffection increased. Any loss in energy or numbers could be blamed on the forces of the ambient secular culture, the lack of catechesis in the previous generation, the lack of forceful leadership by previous bishops.

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UNITED STATES
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests

For immediate release: Tuesday, April 21

Statement by David Clohessy of St. Louis, director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests ( 314 566 9790, DavidGClohessy@gmail.com )

Finally, more than two years after his conviction, Bishop Robert Finn has been ousted. This is a tiny but belated step forward.

After centuries of abuse and cover up done in secrecy, and decades of abuse and cover up done somewhat in public, one pope has finally seen fit to oust one bishop for complicity in clergy sex crimes. That’s encouraging. But it’s only a very tiny drop of reform in an enormous bucket of horror.

Finn’s departure will, in the short term, make some adults happier. By itself, it won’t, in the long term, make many kids safer.

Keep in mind that dozens of Kansas City Catholic employees are concealing or have concealed clergy sex crimes. So it’s irresponsible for anyone to get complacent. Protecting predators and endangering kids is a deeply-rooted and long-standing pattern in the Catholic hierarchy. It didn’t start with one man and won’t stop with one man.”

There were dozens of church staff who could and should have stopped Fr. Shawn Ratigan’s crimes by simply calling 911. But they protected themselves and their jobs by stayed silent. They too should be ousted by the Vatican.

But the scandal in Kansas City goes far beyond the Ratigan crisis. In the early 1990s, we declared that it was one of the most mean-spirited in the US regarding how it treats survivors, especially those who seek justice in court.

It still is. Finn continues to exploit several legal technicalities to protect child molesting clerics and deny victims their day in court.

Virtually no KC Catholic employee has had the courage to speak up when Finn

–-argues in court that he’s not responsible when a priest sexually assaults a child on private property (And Finn has won on this claim.)

[SNAP]

[Kansas City Star]

– let his priests try to violate the privacy of child sex abuse victims, witnesses, whistleblowers and advocates by subpoenaing personal mail and email going back decades.

[SNAP]

Virtually no KC Catholic employee has had the courage to speak up when

– in the weeks after the Fr. Ratigan crisis exploded, five other KC area clerics were accused of or suspended for alleged sexual misconduct. (Fr. Michael Tierney, Fr. James Urbanic, Fr. Bede Parry, seminarian Nicholas Pinkston and Msgr. Robert Murphy. All but Parry and Pinkston were in active ministry when they were accused.)

–it was disclosed that KC church official paid for a serial predator priest, Msgr. Thomas Reardon, to become a licensed counselor, even after several credible abuse allegations against him were made.

[SNAP]

Virtually no KC Catholic employee has had the courage to warn a single parent or parishioner about

–Fr. Thomas Cronin of Nevada, who is involved with a homeless women’s shelter in Nevada despite a pending civil lawsuit in Kansas City that charges him with sexually violating a young woman.

[BishopAccountability.org]

–-Bishop Joseph Hart of Wyoming who, as a priest in KC, molested at least six boys. (They have sued and those suits have settled.)

Virtually no KC Catholic employee spoke up when Finn

–kept Fr. Tierney on the job for six months even after he’d been named in two child sex abuse lawsuits,

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AUSTRALIA
The Guardian

Australian Associated Press
Tuesday 21 April 2015

A senior Catholic nun has admitted her response to allegations of physical and sexual abuse at a central Queensland orphanage was inadequate and exacerbated victims’ suffering.

The national head of the Sisters of Mercy, Berneice Loch, told a royal commission on Tuesday she was sorry she had not acted more compassionately towards former residents of the Neerkol orphanage, near Rockhampton.

Loch was the congregational leader of the Sisters of Mercy, which ran the orphanage between 1885 and 1978, when former residents came forward in the 1990s with claims they had been physically and sexually abused by nuns and priests.

The royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse heard that instead of speaking to complainants, Loch ran the claims by nuns who had worked at the orphanage and other former residents.

She also supported the legal defence of abuse victims’ compensation claims and organised the drafting of a press release (which was never sent out) that referred to “bitter and resentful” orphanage residents.

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VATICAN CITY
RTE News

A US Catholic bishop has resigned after he failed to alert authorities after child abuse images were found on a priest’s computer three years ago.

Robert W Finn, 62, of Kansas City was the only Catholic bishop to be convicted for not reporting suspicion of child abuse.

Groups representing victims of abuse by clerics had been urging Pope France to dismiss him.

Finn was the subject of a Vatican investigation that started last September into his leadership of the diocese of Kansas City-St Joseph, Missouri.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
Pitch

Posted By Justin Kendall on Tue, Apr 21, 2015

Bishop Robert Finn is finally out. Pope Francis has reportedly accepted Finn’s resignation. Finally.

In September 2012, Finn was convicted on a misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse and received two years of probation. That conviction stemmed from Finn shielding priest Shawn Ratigan, who was found to be keeping sexual images of young girls on a laptop in 2010.

The Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph knew about the images for five months before sharing the information with law enforcement authorities. Instead of keeping Ratigan away from the flock, Finn placed him at an Independence mission house where he would be accused of victimizing a 12-year-old girl on Easter Sunday — the same girl whom he was accused of taking naked pictures of when she was 6 years old.

Ratigan pleaded guilty to several child-pornography-related charges in August 2012. His victims ranged in age from 2 to 12.

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VATICAN CITY
The Tablet (UK)

21 April 2015 12:10 by Abigail Frymann Rouch

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the only American bishop to have been convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse, the Vatican announced today.

The resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City–St Joseph “because of ill health or some other grave cause” took effect from Tuesday.

Bishop Finn, 62, was given a sentence of two years’ court-supervised probation for failing to report an instance of clergy sex abuse to the authorities.

Bishop Finn failed to inform the authorities when a computer technician discovered hundreds of indecent photos of underage minors on the laptop of a priest, Fr Shawn Ratigan. Finn sent him for therapy and ordered him to not be near children. But he continued to attend church events and take inappropriate photos of girls for five more months. Church officials reported him in May 2011, without Bishop Finn’s approval.

Although the bishop avoided jail, campaigners called for the Pope to discipline and remove him. And since the establishment of the Vatican’s Commission for the Protection of Minors a year ago, Bishop Finn’s situation has been seen as a test case for Pope Francis.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KCTV

By Chris Meggs, News Producer

KANSAS CITY, MO (KCTV/AP) –
Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn.

Finn was in charge of the Kansas City-St. Joseph diocese in Missouri.

In 2012, Finn pleaded guilty to failing to report a priest who was suspected of abusing children.

The Vatican said Finn offered his resignation under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office.

Finn waited six months before notifying police about the Rev. Shawn Ratigan. Ratigan’s computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken around churches where he worked.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic Herald (UK)

The Vatican has announced the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St Joseph.

In a statement released earlier today, the Vatican said that “the Holy Father has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert W Finn from the pastoral governance” of his diocese. The statement did not name a successor.

Bishop Finn was convicted in September 2012 of failing to report an accusation of child abuse. He waited five months before reporting that explicit images of young girls were found on the computer of one of his priests. He is, to date, the only US bishop to be found guilty of such a charge.

As a result of the conviction, Bishop Finn served a two-year suspended sentence and the diocese was fined $1.1 million.

The Vatican had previously been criticised for failing to remove the bishop from his post. Yesterday, Marie Collins, an abuse survivor and member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, told CruxNow, she could not understand why Bishop Finn had remained in his position.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KSHB

Steve Kaut

A diocese press statement about 5:45 a.m. Tuesday stated Pope Francis accepted Finn’s resignation.

Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City in Kansas will serve as interim leader of the diocese until a new bishop is selected.

Finn has been under scrutiny for several years after being convicted in 2012 in Jackson County Court of one misdemeanor count of failing to report suspected child abuse.

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VATICAN CITY
Reuters

VATICAN CITY | BY PHILIP PULLELLA

(Reuters) – Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City, who was convicted of failing to alert authorities to a trove of child pornography found on a priest’s computer in 2012, has resigned, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

Finn, 62, was the only U.S. Roman Catholic bishop to be convicted for not reporting suspicion of child abuse. Groups representing victims of abuse by clerics had been urging the pope to dismiss Finn.

The bishop was the subject of a Vatican investigation that started last September into his leadership of the diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Missouri.

A Vatican statement said Pope Francis had accepted Finn’s resignation.

A court in Kansas City convicted Finn in 2012 of failing to report suspected child abuse after the child pornography was found on a computer of former priest of his diocese, Shawn Ratigan.

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VATICAN CITY
Sacramento Bee

BY NICOLE WINFIELD ASSOCIATED PRESS
04/21/2015

VATICAN CITY
Pope Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of a U.S. bishop who pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspected priestly child abuser in the first known case of a pope sanctioning bishops for covering up for pedophiles.

The Vatican said Tuesday that Bishop Robert Finn had offered his resignation under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office. It didn’t provide a reason.

Finn, who leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, waited six months before notifying police about the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken in and around churches where he worked. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges. …

Earlier this month, members of the pope’s sex abuse advisory commission came to Rome in an unscheduled session to voice their concern about Barros.

O’Malley subsequently told the pope that the Vatican must come up with “appropriate procedures and modalities to evaluate and adjudicate cases of ‘abuse of office'” when bishops fail to protect children.

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UNITED STATES
Washington Post

Vatican accepts resignation of Kansas [City] bishop convicted of sex abuse coverup but remained in office

By Michelle Boorstein April 21

The Vatican on Tuesday announced the resignation of a Kansas bishop who was convicted of a sex abuse cover-up but remained in office – a fact that particularly horrified abuse survivors and their advocates. Bishop Robert Finn’s resignation will be seen as a key achievement for Pope Francis, who has said his papacy would show more accountability for abuse within the church.

The Vatican announced the resignation of Finn, 62, in an unspecific, brief note in its daily bulletin:

“The Holy Father has accepted the resignation from the pastoral government of the diocese of St. Joseph-Kansas City, Mo. (United States) presented His Excellency Bishop Robert Finn,” it read. Vatican Radio said the bulletin cited canon law 401, paragraph 2, which reads:

“A diocesan bishop who has become less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause is earnestly requested to present his resignation from office.”

Particularly outspoken about Finn was Marie Collins, who sits on Francis’ advisory commission on abuse. Collins and others have helped keep Finn in the spotlight as a powerful symbol of what critics see as the church’s lack of accountability. He was the only U.S. bishop to be criminally convicted in an abuse cover-up. He received two years of probation in 2012 for not telling authorities after a computer technician found hundreds of images of child pornography on a priest’s laptop and told Finn. Finn remained in office for three more years.

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VATICAN CITY
USA Today

Jane Onyanga-Omara, USA TODAY April 21, 2015

Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of an American bishop who was found guilty of failing to tell police about a suspected pedophile priest.

The Vatican on Tuesday said the pope accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn, who leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri.

The resignation was offered under the code of canon law that allows resignation for illness or a “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office.

In 2012, Finn pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge for failing to report suspected abuse after the Rev. Shawn Ratigan took hundreds of lewd images of children in Catholic schools and parishes.

Finn became the first U.S. bishop to be convicted in a criminal court of failing to take action over a suspected abuser and was sentenced to two years’ probation.

Ratigan pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and was sentenced to 50 years in prison.

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KANSAS CITY (MO)
KMBC

Kris Ketz

KANSAS CITY, Mo. —The Vatican has just announced that Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Bishop of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph Robert Finn.

A release issued by the diocese says Finn offered his resignation under a code of Canon Law allowing bishops to resign early.

Finn was the highest-ranking U.S. church leader to be convicted for failing to take action in response to sex abuse allegations. He was charged in the case of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken in and around churches where he worked. Diocesan officials waited six months before they notified civil authorities of the photos. Ratigan pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison.

The diocese said Kansas City, Kansas Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann has been appointed Apostolic Administrator until a new bishop is appointed.

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VATICAN CITY
Lethbridge Herald

BY NICOLE WINFIELD, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ON APRIL 21, 2015.

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Tuesday accepted the resignation of a U.S. bishop who pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspected priestly child abuser in the first known case of a pope cracking down on a bishop who covered up for a pedophile.

The Vatican said Tuesday that Bishop Robert Finn had offered his resignation under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office. It didn’t provide the reason.

Finn, who leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, waited six months before notifying police about the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken in and around churches where he worked. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges.

Finn pleaded guilty to a misdemeanour charge of failure to report suspected abuse and was sentenced to two years’ probation in 2012.

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CHILE
La Vanguardia

[Much anger in southern Chile over bishop appointment – The Tribune]

[A Chilean bishop is protected by bodyguards and police dogs.]

SANTIAGO DE CHILE. (Ap).- Los feligreses de una diócesis del sur de Chile se reúnen allí donde aparece su nuevo obispo, pero su presencia no es el tipo de reunión que esperaría la Iglesia católica. En un mes que el obispo Juan Barros lleva instalado en Osorno, ha tenido que salir a hurtadillas por puertas traseras, ha tenido que llamar a la policía antidisturbios y protegerse con escoltas y la ayuda de perros policía.

El nombramiento de Juan Barros por el papa Francisco ha provocado una ola de protestas sin precedentes. Más de 1.300 feligreses, 30 sacerdotes diocesanos y casi la mitad del Parlamento de Chile han enviado cartas instando al Papa a reconsiderar su decisión.

¿El motivo? Se cree que el nuevo obispo protege al pedófilo más conocido de Chile.

Al menos tres hombres afirman que Barros estaba presente cuando sufrieron abusos sexuales en los años ochenta y noventa por parte del sacerdote Fernando Karadima. Este fue sancionado por el Vaticano en el 2011 y obligado a residir en un convento de monjas. Juan Barros dijo no saber nada del asunto.

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VATICAN CITY
Daily Journal

By NICOLE WINFIELD Associated Press
First Posted: April 20, 2015

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is mounting a campaign to defend an 18th century Franciscan missionary who will be canonized by Pope Francis in the U.S. against protests from Native Americans who have compared his conversion of natives to genocide.

The Vatican is teaming up with the archdiocese of Los Angeles and the main U.S. seminary in Rome to host a daylong celebration May 2 at the North American College to honor the Rev. Junipero Serra, who introduced Christianity to much of California as he marched north with Spanish conquistadors. Francis will celebrate Mass in his honor.

For the church, Serra was a great evangelizer and a model for today’s Hispanics. Many Native Americans, though, say Serra helped wipe out native populations, enslaved converts and spread disease as he brutally imposed Christianity on them. They have staged protests in California and there is a move to remove his statue from the U.S. Capitol.

Vatican officials on Monday defended Serra’s record, saying it shows he worked in defense of Native Americans, often intervening to spare them from the more brutal colonial officials.

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VATICAN CITY
Malta Today

Robert Finn, 62, is the lone American bishop ever to be found guilty of a criminal charge for failure to report an accusation of child abuse.

21 April 2015

In what is likely to be hailed as major step toward accountability for Catholic bishops who mishandle sexual abuse allegations, the Vatican has announced the resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph.

The announcement came Tuesday in a brief statement in the Vatican’s daily news bulletin, released at noon Rome time. Finn, whose resignation is effective immediately, will remain a bishop, but no longer lead a diocese. It is up to Pope Francis to name his successor.

Finn, 62, is the lone American bishop ever to be found guilty of a criminal charge for failure to report an accusation of child abuse. His September 2012 conviction on a misdemeanor charge stemmed from Finn waiting several months before telling police that explicit images of young girls had been discovered on the computer of the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, one of his priests.

Finn was sentenced to two years of probation, and the diocese received a fine of $1.1 million when an arbitrator ruled that it had violated the terms of an earlier settlement.

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VATICAN CITY
Vatican Radio

(Vatican Radio) The Holy Father has accepted the resignation of Bishop Robert W. Finn from the pastoral governance of the Diocese of Kansas City – St Joseph (USA), in conformity with canon 401, paragraph 2 of the Code of Canon Law.

Pope Francis on Tuesday also accepted the resignation of the Office of Auxiliary of the Archdiocese of Guadalajara (Mexico), presented by Bishop José Trinidad González Rodríguez, in conformity with canon 401, paragraph 2 of the Code of Canon Law.

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VATICAN CITY
Catholic News Agency

by Elise Harris

Vatican City, Apr 21, 2015 / 04:47 am (CNA/EWTN News).- Nearly two and a half years after being the first U.S. bishop convicted of a misdemeanor in failing to report suspected child abuse by a priest in his diocese, Kansas City-St. Joseph’s bishop has resigned.

The Vatican confirmed Pope Francis’ acceptance of Bishop Finn’s resignation according to Canon 104 Article 2 in the Code of Canon Law in an April 21 statement.

Article 2 of Canon 104, according to the Vatican’s website, refers to a situation when “a diocesan bishop who has become less able to fulfill his office because of ill health or some other grave cause is earnestly requested to present his resignation from office.”

Last September, two years after Bishop Finn’s trial and guilty verdict, an archbishop held a visitation on behalf of the Vatican and met with Bishop Finn.

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VATICAN CITY
NBC 29

VATICAN CITY (AP) – Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of a U.S. bishop who pleaded guilty to failing to report a suspected priestly child abuser, answering demands of victims to crackdown on bishops who covered up for pedophiles.

The Vatican said Tuesday that Bishop Robert Finn had offered his resignation under the code of canon law that allows bishops to resign early for illness or some “grave” reason that makes them unfit for office.

Finn, who leads the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph in Missouri, waited six months before notifying police about the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, whose computer contained hundreds of lewd photos of young girls taken in and around churches where he worked. Ratigan was sentenced to 50 years in prison after pleading guilty to child pornography charges.

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CALIFORNA
SFGate

Kale Williams
April 20, 2015

A priest with the Archdiocese of San Jose was indicted by a federal grand jury on tax evasion and bank fraud charges after he allegedly deposited donation checks from parishioners into his own bank and failed to declare more than $1 million of income to the Internal Revenue Service, prosecutors said Monday.

Hien Minh Nguyen, 55, worked as a priest with the diocese for more than 20 years, said U.S. Attorney’s Office spokesman Abraham Simmons. He held multiple positions, including Director of the Vietnamese Catholic Center, for which he had sole signature authority of the center’s bank, Simmons said.

Between 2005 and 2008, Nguyen requested that parishioners make donations to the center, but then deposited at least 14 checks, totaling $19,000, directly into his personal account, Simmons said.

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CALIFORNIA
Contra Costa Times

By Howard Mintz hmintz@mercurynews.com

A San Jose priest has been indicted on federal fraud and tax evasion charges, accused of abusing his position by diverting thousands of dollars in donations from parishioners into his personal bank account over a three-year period.

In an indictment made public on Monday, Hien Minh Nguyen, a priest with the Diocese of San Jose, is charged with 14 counts of bank fraud as well as failing to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in income between 2008 and 2011. The 55-year-old priest was arrested on Saturday in Florida and appeared in federal court in Fort Lauderdale on Monday.

He is expected to eventually face the charges in San Francisco federal court, where a grand jury indicted him earlier this month.

In a statement, Bishop Patrick McGrath said the diocese could not comment on the charges, but disclosed that it has been cooperating with federal investigators since October 2012. Nguyen has been on personal leave from his position since December 2013, according to the diocese.

Nguyen has been a priest since 1994, holding various positions with the San Jose diocese, including director of the Vietnamese Catholic Center and Vicar for the Vietnamese ministry, according to the indictment.

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CALIFORNIA
KRON

By Molly Martinez
Published: April 20, 2015

SAN JOSE (BCN) — A Roman Catholic priest who formerly ran the Vietnamese Catholic Center for the Diocese of San Jose has been indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose on bank fraud and tax evasion charges.

Hien Minh Nguyen, 55, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Saturday and made an initial appearance in federal court there today, according to Abraham Simmons, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag for the Northern District of California.

An indictment charging him with 14 counts of bank fraud and four counts of tax evasion was unsealed following his court appearance today. The grand jury issued the indictment under seal on April 7.

The tax fraud counts allege that Nguyen underreported his income by a total of $1.1 million for the 2008 through 2011 tax years.

In the bank fraud counts, he is alleged to have deposited into his personal bank account 14 checks totaling $19,000 that were given to him by parishioners between 2005 and 2008 as donations for the Vietnamese Catholic Center.

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UNITED STATES
Headlines from the Catholic World

Washington D.C., Apr 21, 2015 / 12:01 am (CNA/EWTN News).- There are tens of thousands of Catholic clergy in the U.S. – but there were fewer than 10 substantiated allegations of clergy sex abuse committed in the 2013-2014 audit period, according to the U.S. bishops’ latest report.

In addition, almost all clergy, laity and other workers and volunteers at Catholic institutions have undergone safe environment training.

Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the bishops’ “first priority” is healing for victims and survivors of abuse.

“We join Pope Francis in his desire that the response of the Church be pastoral and immediate,” the archbishop said in the preface to the annual report on the implementation of the bishops’ Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.

“Though our promise to protect and heal made in 2002 remains strong, we must not become complacent with what has been accomplished,” Archbishop Kurtz said in an April 17 announcement from the U.S. bishops’ conference.

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